


Easily Assimilated

by Eccentric_Hat



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Campaign: Amnesty (The Adventure Zone), Exile, M/M, come on everybody let's get sad about the Quell, other characters and tags to come, the backstory has backstory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:42:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22724875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eccentric_Hat/pseuds/Eccentric_Hat
Summary: A long time before the founding of Amnesty Lodge, two desperate people from a dying world are sent into exile. They don’t know why they’re here, or how to survive, or how to let go of their considerable baggage from back home. But one of them does know the future. So that’s a start.(or)So, Barclay, why didn’t you tell us about you and the Mothman?
Relationships: Barclay/Indrid Cold (The Adventure Zone)
Comments: 29
Kudos: 25





	1. Prologue: I shall speak with becoming frankness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [2/14/20] This is the prologue to something much longer and very unfinished, but I decided I could polish up and post this bit as a treat. Chapter title is from the gloriously odd [Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18362/pg18362-images.html) by Greenville Kleiser, published in 1917; fic title is from [Candide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1Kx_bOtpwg) and should make more sense when there's more story.

“So, Barclay,” Ned says. “Why didn’t you tell us about you and the Mothman?”

Barclay’s head snaps up. He didn’t even realize Ned was in the kitchen. Breakfast cleanup is over and he’s been leaning against the counter paging through _The Moosewood Cookbook_ , thinking idly of trying again to get Kepler interested in tempeh. “What?” he says. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about that warm welcome you gave to the visitor in a Winnebago yesterday, who didn’t even stop in to say hello to the rest of the Pine Guard.”

It’s been a few weeks since Indrid got wrapped up in the December hunt and retreated to lick his wounds. When he finally showed up yesterday, Barclay jogged out to meet the Winnebago as it pulled up, and Indrid opened the door and stepped directly into his arms, murmuring, “I’m a little scratched up but I honestly promise I’m fine.”

“One person on this whole planet trained in sylph physiology and you won’t let me help you when you’re hurt,” Barclay said into the top of his head, but there was no real anger behind it. Even after all this time, _Indrid is safe_ felt like _we’re safe_ felt like _everything is okay,_ like the most important thing Barclay could do was get his arms inside Indrid’s stupidly unzipped coat and hold him as close as possible. They stayed like that for a while, until Indrid kissed him quickly and said, “It’s nice that you’re such a living furnace, but it’s still winter in the mountains,” and tugged them both inside to Barclay’s room.

It was hardly a scandalous display, but Ned, looking studiously casual with his hands in his pockets, waggles his eyebrows a bit as he asks, “Do your housemates know about your boyfriend?”

“That’s a weird word to use for Indrid,” Barclay says. Indrid's childhood was a very long time ago, and even when he was small he wouldn’t have been called a boy, exactly—the word for children of his species doesn’t have a good equivalent in English. Barclay opens a drawer to rummage around in the spatulas, pretending to look for something.

“Well then, what do you prefer? Gentleman caller? Significant other?”

“What’s with that term?” Barclay asks. “It always sounds like a figure in an equation.”

Ned evades the attempted subject change. “Reason for living? I could just refer to him as your lover.”

Barclay frowns. “Are you trying to embarrass me?”

“Reason for living it is!” Ned says, and he actually seems to consider the conversation over, as he starts to pivot on his heel to leave.

“Hold on,” Barclay says. “Is there some reason that we would ever, ever have a conversation when you would need to use any of those words?”

Ned looks him over, and Barclay tries to keep his body language as neutral as possible under that weirdly perceptive gaze. “So you want this to be a secret, or…”

“No, it’s not a secret. I think you have enough of my secrets, Ned Fuckin’ Discretion Chicane.” He tries to close the drawer, but a spatula gets stuck and he has to try three times before finally shoving it closed. Maybe he’s more irritated than he realized. “I just want you to understand, this isn’t—Indrid isn’t someone you can use, or try to get to through me, or anything like that. He’s not Pine Guard, he has other things going on. Mama knows that already and I guess you all should too. If he thinks he needs to help us again then he will.”

Ned nods slowly. “Sure, Barclay. That’s not weird or mysterious at all.”

“You’ve met the guy, are you really surprised by _weird and mysterious_ at this point?”

Ned snorts and lets it go, or seems to. After he leaves, Barclay goes to find Indrid in the RV, sitting at his table with the blinds closed and his disguise off, drawing. When Barclay comes in, Indrid looks up with a slight smile on his face and says, “Okay, out with it.”

Barclay takes off his bracelet, stretches his arms out a little, and steps carefully around Indrid's wings to sit in the other chair and give a summary of his conversation with Ned. Indrid resumes his drawing halfway through the story, and when it’s done he says, “Tell me what bothered you about Ned’s question.”

Barclay clears away some of Indrid’s drawings to make space on the table for his elbows. “Which one?” he asks. “The language question, or the why-didn’t-you-tell question?”

“Is there a meaningful difference?”

“Well. Probably not. I just latched onto the words because he was taking the upper hand in the conversation.”

“Which you didn’t want him to have.”

“Which I don’t want anybody to have, on this subject. But mostly I didn’t want him to treat you as an asset or a secret weapon.”

Indrid keeps drawing, but he reaches out one of his free hands and lays it on Barclay’s arm. “You’re sweet. And he won’t, probably. I’ll volunteer if I’m needed.”

“Yeah, that’s more or less what I said.” He pauses and looks at Indrid’s sketch; it looks like something happening far away, judging by all the tall buildings. “Anyway…Kepler people think they know each other’s business. It’s a little weird to tell someone here that I’m in a relationship with someone they’ve never heard of. Like I made you up so I could let someone down gently. And whatever word I use, it’s like I’m saying you’re—I don’t know, someone I met online who lives in Charleston, or something. It feels like a lie, and I don’t like to feel that way when I talk about you.”

Indrid looks mildly amused, but the way he grasps Barclay’s arm suggests he’s touched. “Well, eventually I want to hear more about whomever you’ve been letting down gently. But I don’t think you’re most concerned about the people in town. How much have you told your amnesty people?” He always says it like that, like he doesn’t mean the people at Amnesty Lodge but the people Barclay, personally, has given amnesty. “Do these new recruits know anything about you at all? Or have you dropped vague hints about your past and let them draw their own Bigfoot conclusions?”

Barclay snorts. “ _The Bigfoot Conclusions_ : the thrilling follow-up to _The Mothman Prophecies_.” He scratches at his head; he always comes out of disguise feeling a little matted.

“It would probably make for a better book.” Indrid stops drawing and focuses on Barclay. “Anyway, it’s only a suggestion, but if you want your friends to understand, you could explain. At least a little. I don’t mind.”

“You’re making too much sense,” Barclay says. Indrid laughs a little. “Maybe when the lodge has fewer crises inside it. Can I hang out here until I stop feeling irritated?”

“You’re allowed to remain irritated, and of course you can stay.”

“I know I’m allowed, but I’m not gonna. Ned’s a friend.”

Indrid twiddles his pencil between his fingers. “Are they worth it? These coworkers of yours?”

Barclay grins. “They’re helping me save the world, aren’t they?”

Indrid visibly thinks through at least one chain of events before he answers, “Yes. On balance, they’re all helping.”

Barclay considers asking for more details of the future he was just looking at. It’s probably not worth it. Pressing Indrid for details on the next crisis may seem like a good idea, but he often regrets it. He stays in the trailer instead, watching Indrid draw worst-case scenarios, putting off the moment when they’ll both need to go out and deal with them.


	2. and the creatures love each other

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, I’m still working on this story! While it isn’t done, I’ve completed a section comprising four chapters and will be uploading those as I finish editing them. Enormous thanks to [PlinytheYounger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlinytheYounger/pseuds/PlinytheYounger) for beta-reading this, especially since she was just minding her own business when I snagged her with a vaudeville hook labeled Mothman Feelings. Chapter title, like the fic title, [is from Candide](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOsLVo9JuAc). After this point I refrain from naming anything else with lyrics from Candide.

Barclay gets shoved through the gate to Earth, followed immediately by an insectoid in so much distress that they stumble and fall to their knees once they’re on the other side.

Barclay stays upright, but he needs a moment to recover himself. It’s night over here and the air is less warm. The landscape is rocky and treeless, the ground scrubby and uneven. They’re on a hillside, and down the hill there’s a village or something, just some distant lights, and there’s a three-quarter moon in the sky. Just the one moon. He can’t tell which way is north until his internal gyroscope stops spinning and starts tentatively indicating a direction behind the gate. That’s a start, then. He turns to look at the other person and is alarmed to see that they’re still on the ground, clutching their head.

“Hey there, hey.” He kneels down and fights the impulse to put out a comforting hand—that would be for his own sake, and it’s an iffy move with non-mammals. “Do you need help? Water? Uh, something else?”

The stranger lets out a sound that might be spelled “eeeoooufff.”

Too agitated to ask for specific help, then. The person is evidently a lepidopteran of some kind, with enormous silver-grey wings that are fluttering rapidly, and for a moment Barclay thinks, and almost says, _don’t fly away_. He might never see another sylph again. He’d like not to lose this one so soon.

Barclay wants to offer some comfort, but since both of them are pretty much fucked he can’t think of anything comforting to say. He sits back on his heels to give the stranger a minute, and after a while the rapid breaths settle into something more even and those enormous eyes look up to see Barclay watching.

“Oh.” They look away. “How embarrassing.”

“It’s okay,” Barclay says. “I think both of us just went through the worst thing we’ve ever experienced.”

“Probably not the worst we ever will, though.”

Barclay frowns. “That’s a pretty—”

“—A pretty glum way to think about it. Yes, it is.” The words overlap with Barclay’s for a moment and it’s eerie. “But accurate.” The stranger straightens and gets up, and Barclay follows, getting his first chance to look the person over. They’re impressive at full height: shorter than Barclay, but with extended wings that seem to double their size, and they’re wearing a dark suit of clothes that afford a vaguely authoritative appearance, plus a pendant that they tuck into their shirt before Barclay can see it properly. The stranger bows a little with an arm diagonally across the chest, a rather old-fashioned gesture of male-professional-greeting-a-peer. “Indrid Cold,” he says. “You’re Doctor Barclay.”

“I—yes. You know about me? Or I guess they said it back there. I had a hard time paying attention.”

“No, neither of those things. I just saw that you were about to say it. I’m a clairvoyant. Yes, that has something to do with why I’m here, and no, fortunately, we’re not in any immediate physical danger, so that’s one thing we have going for us.”

“Oh.” Barclay was going into caretaker mode a moment ago; it’s disorienting to suddenly be at a disadvantage. Something clicks into place in his head: “Was that why going through the gate hit you so hard? All the new information?”

“Hm.” Indrid Cold looks away, embarrassed again, and crosses two of his arms over his chest. “I perceive futures based on physical proximity, so—”

“So hopping across the galaxy meant you had a whole different data set to work with, didn’t it?”

Indrid stares at him, though the difference between a stare and simple eye contact is difficult to tell with no eyelids. “Goodness, you’re finishing _my_ sentences. It’s like being back at school.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be, I started it. Look, much as I’d like to talk, it’s cold and getting colder and I think we should find shelter first.”

Barclay is tempted to say that it isn’t cold—it’s well above freezing, even though the air is slightly damp—but it is colder than home, and they’re out in the open, so he just says, “Okay.”

  


Exile is almost unfathomably cruel. It removes the subject permanently from their home and family, cuts them off from their source of energy and puts them at risk of starving until they become feral, denies them the possibility that their spirits will survive their death, and places them into a world where they will be an object of fear and a target of violence. Past Interpreters have congratulated themselves on not using capital punishment, but exile is hardly kinder.

And yet the gate itself manifests a peculiar mercy. It forms in a place where the Earth will provide what energy it can offer: a hot spring, a ley line, a system of caves where the planet’s energy pervades the rock. It gives someone passing through it the ability to understand the language where they arrive. It never opens under an ocean or at the bottom of an inescapable canyon or in the middle of an uninhabited desert.

Barclay’s cautious about ascribing consciousness to natural phenomena, but he still feels something like gratitude on his first day in exile, after a night spent on the ground in a falling-down shed pretending to sleep, but really gazing into the darkness in helpless shock, when he and Indrid locate the hot spring.

The spring is the size of a small lake and has a chalky blue-green color. Barclay gets down on a knee to dip a finger in the water. It’s bathwater-warm, and better yet, it’s vital: he feels a tiny stirring of energy in his hand and he immerses it further, hungry.

“I think we might live,” he says to Indrid, who’s standing over him.

“Well, yes.” Apparently Indrid wasn’t paying attention to what future-Barclay would say, because he sounds surprised. “Our chances are actually very decent. Did you expect to die straightaway?”

Barclay takes his hand out of the water and straightens up, feeling obscurely annoyed. “Frankly I’ve been a little too traumatized about the end of my life as I knew it to get too rational about whether I’d technically survive.”

“My apologies.” Indrid has all of his arms folded around the front of his body as if to hold himself together, and his face is impossible to read. “I should have told you. I’ve been looking at the futures. There are a lot of them where we both live for a good long while. Though of course if the hot spring weren’t here then things would be different.”

Barclay wants to interrogate the notion of a good long while, but not as much as he wants to get in the water. “Okay. Is anyone coming? Are there people who use this pool?”

“We’re safe right now. The Earth people aren’t coming back to reclaim this place for probably decades. There’s a very old changing house in that direction, if you want to use it. You can go first; I have more to look at.”

The pool is more than large enough for two people to swim in it at the same time without sacrificing their modesty, but Indrid seems decided on this point. He walks a little ways off and parks himself on the ground, facing away from the water, wings trembling a little in the slight breeze. Barclay watches him go, shrugs, and forgoes the changing house—what need?—to get out of yesterday’s clothes and dive in. He hasn’t swum for years, but his body more or less remembers how, and the water soaks in through his fur and offers something like hope.

  


“Okay, so why did you get exiled? Was it a court politics thing?”

Indrid glances sideways at him. “In a manner of speaking.”

“If you don’t want to tell me, you can just say so. You don’t have to weasel around it like that.”

“Sorry.” He seems uncomfortable. They’re both sitting on the ground on the hillside near the gate, and Indrid is bent over a selection of objects he pulled out of a trash bin in town—one of the huge metal trash bins kept behind a commercial building, not one of the smaller kind found adjacent to people’s homes. They looked in some of those and found there was usually food waste in there. The commercial ones are mostly cleaner and more specialized. Indrid has heard about a way to enchant a small wearable item—a sock, a watch, a ring—so that it changes the wearer’s appearance. He’s trying to get them both human disguises. The fact that they don’t have these yet made their excursion to look through people’s trash a nerve-racking one, and Barclay was relieved to get back out into the scrub. He couldn’t tell whether Indrid was relieved or not. He’s intensely curious about Indrid’s experience of things like risk and fear—what does that mean, for a clairvoyant? But he knows that when he asks questions like that, he usually makes people feel like experimental subjects. So he’s asking Indrid a different personal question instead. It doesn’t look like he’s going to get an answer.

There’s a long silence. Indrid scans through a handful of newspapers with one pair of hands while sorting small inscrutable doodads into piles with the other. Barclay doesn’t understand how he can do all these things at the same time. It might be related to how he can see both the present and the future—some kind of partitioning in his cognitive processes.

“I wasn’t at court,” Indrid says suddenly. “I think you’re assuming I was an official seer, but I didn’t even live in the city.”

“Wait, really?” Barclay tries to remember if he’s ever heard of a private citizen who could see the future. There was one on the board of regents at the university, but that was a government role. “What did you do, then?”

“This and that. Published a newspaper, mainly. Made things. Consulted on the future sometimes, but that wasn’t my focus.”

“So does ‘made things’ mean you tinkered with lamps sometimes, or you constructed a bomb to be smuggled into the Interpreter’s office?”

“Neither.” Indrid looks at him pointedly and Barclay regrets the question. “I made magical items. It was a minor sideline for me, but if you already believed I was dangerous then you could convince yourself I was making any manner of things. And the paper didn’t exactly toe the line. There are a lot of rules about abilities like mine, and if you want, you can use them to interpret pretty much anything I do as a crime. Publishing a warning of danger means I’m fomenting fear and unrest; not doing it makes me culpable if people end up being hurt or killed. Basically anyone who wanted to get rid of me could do it if they tried hard enough, and that’s been true all along, and eventually I said or published or made the wrong thing so now it’s finally happened.”

It’s a pretty long speech. Barclay stays quiet for a little and watches Indrid multitasking. 

“So you knew this was going to happen?” he asks, softly. Indrid had seemed so shocked when they were sent through the gate.

“More or less. But since it was a constant possibility, I couldn’t really tell when it would come true. Rather like how most people know that they are going to die, just not when or how. I was always going to end up here if I lived long enough.”

“I’m sorry.”

Indrid lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. “Well.” The hands that were paging through the newspaper set it down and smooth over the paper a few times, then clasp together and twiddle their thumbs. His other two hands are still messing with the garbage—he’s found some bits of metal hardware and is sorting them by size.

Barclay debates asking, and decides to go for it: “What’s it like outside the city these days?”

“In the inner-ring towns? Suffering from the Quell, but not dead yet. It won’t be long, though. Another thirty or forty years, depending how things are managed.”

That’s hard to respond to.

“I don’t know why I got exiled,” Barclay offers. “That is, I think I know whose fault it is, but I don’t know why it escalated like this.”

“I hear nasty things about academic politics,” Indrid says.

“Sure, but this is awfully extreme.”

“What was your research about?”

Barclay can’t resist: “Does it matter if I answer your questions? Since you can see the future where I’ve already answered.”

“It matters. If I decide not to ask, or you decide to quit answering, then there stop being futures where we have the conversation. And predicting speech is an inefficient way to learn things. Usually people don’t settle on their words more than a moment in advance; if I listen ahead very far, it’s a cacophony of possibilities. I can sort through it if I have to, but it’s simpler to let you talk.”

“I guess that makes sense.” Barclay pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them. “I research exogenous evolutionary biology. How organisms become more Sylvan, in other words. I focus on the early generations of creatures who arrived from Earth. Mostly cognitive skills and how they do or don’t relate to the development of humanoid physical characteristics.”

Indrid clasps his other two hands and gives Barclay his full attention. “So you were theorizing about when someone becomes a person.”

“You could put it that way, but I wouldn’t.”

“If you wanted to avoid academic politics, there were other subjects you might have studied.”

“Well, yeah, of course. But it’s an important subject, and it has serious ramifications. Recent arrivals are underserved socially, educationally, medically, because they’re usually not considered to be people yet, and there’s a lot we don’t know about their needs. Legally, sylphs are only considered citizens when they demonstrate certain abilities—speech is a big one, but if you can’t talk or can’t do it well, it helps to be bipedal. It’s very likely we’re not providing adequate recognition and protections for individuals capable of self-determination, just because we don’t recognize the way they think.”

“And you were going to establish a new standard?” Indrid asks archly.

“No, of course not. Citizenship is a question of values and relationships. But we can’t operate in a vacuum of scientific facts, and if someone doesn’t study these questions in a practical and ethical way then people will keep basing their decisions on lies and garbage science from two hundred years ago.”

“So who was your enemy?” Indrid asks, apparently amused. “A two-hundred-year-old liar and garbage scientist?”

“No.” Barclay sighs. “A colleague. A kinda chauvinistic Sylvan colleague. I don’t know it was his fault, it just seems likely, since we’d been at loggerheads a few times, and after a while he started dropping suggestions about my family background. But exile is awfully extreme.”

“Ah.” Indrid turns back to his work. He threads a wire through a series of little metal rings and then lifts it toward Barclay. “Well, regardless of your origins, here you are to stay. Hold out your hand.”

Indrid wraps the wire around Barclay’s wrist, twisting the ends together to secure it. “Now,” he says, “don’t panic,” and he weaves his hands in a weird pattern of gestures around the bracelet. Barclay is very close to disobeying that instruction but he breathes deliberately, keeping his eyes on Indrid.

There’s a tiny spark of light from Barclay’s wrist. The colors of his surroundings change subtly and he looks down at himself to see the body of a human man, his clothes hanging loosely off of him. A slight breeze blows up, shockingly intimate against the bare skin of his face.

“Shit,” he says softly.

“Congratulations, Doctor,” says Indrid, “on your rapid evolution.”

  


* * *

  


Not long after Indrid learned to see Sylvain’s future, he saw that it had an end.

Not everyone knew it, but already the death of the planet was almost, though not quite, an inevitability. Indrid tried for a long time to focus on the small chance of survival. But that was so shadowy and unlikely, so bound up in events he couldn’t see clearly, that it provided no comfort at all. Hoping for it was irrational, and working for it nearly destroyed him. There is no reason now to think Sylvain will be saved.

It is technically a gift to know this; it’s knowledge that he has attempted to handle responsibly. It is still fundamentally unbearable. He has always been worse off for knowing it.

In that respect, being here in this quiet corner of the Earth is a relief. There’s no single event at the end of all the futures he can see from here, just fractally multiplying possibilities, dimmer the farther away they are. He focuses his vision on this spot so that he can see only the domestic comings and goings of the village nearby, the animals in the countryside, and themselves, two exiles camped in the lea of a hill.

Indrid makes himself a disguise too, of course, with a clunky bracelet like Barclay’s. As a human he’s a little shorter than Barclay, less hirsute, and his wings and second pair of arms tuck themselves away into the illusion. The clothes he was wearing when they arrived adapt with his human disguise, but they’re not especially warm, and the problem appears of how to get any more of them.

“I don’t know that much about Earth society,” Barclay says. They’re walking toward the village as they try to decide what to do. “But I’m pretty sure they have a monetary system.”

“A fair assumption.”

“And we’re broke.”

“Yes. I think we shall have to resort to theft.”

Barclay looks down the hill at the village and frowns. “I’m not volunteering for any breaking and entering.”

“Shh.” Indrid waves a hand at him and then stands there thinking through the possibilities. This shouldn’t be a hard problem. “Okay. Clotheslines. Come on.”

He leads them around the back of a shop where there aren’t any windows. They look like humans now, and that mitigates some of the danger—although it’s such a small town that strangers are still suspicious. Also Barclay is a little clumsy in the new body; Indrid frowns and stops abruptly, and Barclay bumps into him, but that’s better than if he had bumped into a trash bin.

“There’s someone hanging up their laundry very near here, and we’re going to walk in that direction,” Indrid explains under his breath. There’s no one near enough to hear him, but later there might be, and it’s worth it to establish the habit now. “Look casual, and then hide when I say.”

Barclay frowns, and no one looking closely would claim that he appears natural on the walk over, but fortunately no one gets that close. They get close enough to the intended clothesline that Indrid can hear the human muttering to herself while she works—rehearsing an intended argument, it sounds like, though she isn’t going to say any of these things when she goes back into the house. Indrid waits until she finishes pinning up her clothes and goes in, using the time to figure out what he’s going for, and then as soon as she’s gone he darts out and comes back with a pair of trousers and a handful of miscellaneous socks.

“Those don’t match,” Barclay points out.

“Look who's an aesthete all of a sudden. Finding the matching ones would take too much time. Come on.”

They go to a couple other houses and make an okay haul of it. Somebody’s even left a sweater out on his front step, probably to air out as it has a weird smell. It’s warm enough to be worth putting up with. Nobody has put out a coat, more’s the pity, but Indrid layers up, adapts. “I worry about how cold you get,” Barclay tells him, watching as Indrid carefully pokes thumb holes in the cuffs of a shirt. “You shouldn’t still be exothermic in this form, should you?”

Indrid giggles a little. “You can call me cold-blooded; I won’t take offense. I’m not, though, not like this. It’s just a lot of work staying warm using a body that’s basically an illusion. I’ll be okay.”

“Are you definitely going to be okay, or are you saying that to be polite?”

“I never say anything to be polite, that’s why I’m here.”

  


They’re constantly working for their own survival. It’s summer here, but the landscape is frugal and offers them little: mushrooms, berries, some leafy plants that yield a tiny amount of nutrition if they eat enough of them. Staying fed is enough to keep both of them occupied, physically and mentally, and for a while there is little conversation between them. That, too, is restful. It inevitably comes to an end.

It’s a little while after they get their human disguises that Indrid comes back from a food-finding mission to find Barclay sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. For a moment it looks as if he’s just running his hands over his new face to get used to it. Indrid’s done that. Barclay had less of a transformation to go through—he hasn’t had to give up the use of any limbs—but he probably feels weird having so much of his skin exposed. It was odd to see him that way, at first, even though Indrid knew ahead of time what he would look like; he looks rather striking as a human, but also constantly upset in a way that wasn’t so clear in his sylph form.

It comes clear, finally: Barclay is going to talk about his feelings.

“What’s wrong?” Indrid asks, to get things started.

Barclay looks up at him, frowns a little apologetically, sighs. “I just realized that my career is over.”

Indrid looks through some possible responses and goes with the relatively neutral, “Yes. Though that’s not something you just learned.”

“No, but I thought I was about to die. Now I might live, and I’m never going to be a scientist again.”

There’s not a lot Indrid can say to that. It’s just true. Realizing something about the future is often hard for people. A pre-image of potential presents itself to him just briefly: himself, taking off his disguise and holding each of Barclay’s hands in two of his own, wrapping his wings around the two of them, offering promises of loyalty and protection.

It’s a sweet image, and not the first of its kind. But here and now they are near strangers. Indrid doesn’t touch people very much in general, especially not on one week’s acquaintance. The inferred emotions of prophecy aren’t the real feelings of now, and regardless, Barclay can’t see any of that. Indrid knows a few things about time, but he can’t compress or hurry it.

He refocuses his attention on the person presently in front of him. Barclay doesn’t seem embarrassed, and in this human body it would be easy to tell if he were, so Indrid probably shouldn’t go away. He finally sees the request for help coming right before Barclay speaks it:

“Tell me what’s going to happen.”

“In the short or long term?”

“Near. Extremely near. Not my fate or anything, just. Right now.”

“All right.” Indrid sits down on the ground in front of Barclay and folds up his legs. “You’re going to stay in that position for a while, apparently. And I’m going to keep talking to you, and you’re going to calm down.”

“I don’t need to be calmed, I need...” Barclay scrubs at his face with his hands a bit and doesn’t find the word he’s looking for.

“Right, see, you don’t know what to call it, and honestly neither do I. I’m going to keep talking to you and you’re going to get over this feeling, for now, or at least you’ll say you feel better.”

Barclay breathes loudly and doesn’t answer. Indrid looks for anything else to say about the immediate future: “Oh! And no one is going to find us here. We’re safe.” No response. “It’s going to get cold again tonight, but not too cold for us to handle. Some birds are going to fly overhead in about an hour and you might find them interesting.”

He drums his fingers, thinking. Barclay seems miles away, and he’s already exhausted the near future as a topic. “I have two siblings,” Indrid tells him. “One named Arden who can see the past and one named Pershing who can see the present. One of my parents always tells the truth and another always lies. The paper I used to publish was typeset with a forty-year-old machine that used hot lead type and the operator had lost a finger to it. He always inserted a mistake on page seventeen because he thought an issue shouldn’t run more than sixteen pages long.”

Barclay looks up at that one. “Wait, why?”

“Why what?”

“Why shouldn’t a newspaper be more than sixteen pages long?”

“It was a…” A religious belief, he’s about to say, but it sounds ridiculous and the story isn’t worth it. “No reason. Actually that was bullshit. I was making things up just to keep talking.”

“So…your family can’t see the past and present?”

“How would that work? Hot type is dangerous, though, stay away from it.”

Barclay seems perplexed. “Was the future part bullshit?”

“No.” Indrid makes eye contact and holds it. “Please understand, that’s a question of professional ethics. I would never.”

“Um. Okay?” Barclay smiles wanly.

“Look, from what I can tell, there’s a limit to how much I can help by talking to you. I think it will go better if you talk a bit too. Can you tell me a story?”

“What kind of story?”

“A true one. One of yours. Tell me about your dissertation defense.”

“Oh. Huh. That story.” Barclay scratches at his wrist a bit, the disguise bracelet sliding around and making some clonking noises. He looks down at it and asks, “You said no one is coming, right?”

“No one at all.”

“All right then.” He carefully unhooks the wire ends of the bracelet and removes it, and his own body comes back almost instantaneously, hair coming in over much of his face and the backs of his hands. He seems a little more relaxed. “My defense…

“So the first thing you gotta know is that my advisor was completely fixated on Light theory. All of his work was about the humanoid form—he was trying to formulate a unified theory of why new arrivals from Earth always end up walking upright on two feet, having opposable thumbs, that kind of thing, whether previous generations had those characteristics or not. He would talk in terms of what the Light of Sylvain wanted, like that form was innately more desirable. I think he was just desperately committed to putting together a theory that meant Sylvain herself hadn’t left us all alone. He wasn’t really sure my work was going to get him any closer to that theory but I guess I convinced him, or at least I was working on a related question that was going to be of value. I didn’t have a super easy time, but nobody ever has a fun and easy time doing their diss research anyway, and I had the support I needed to finish.”

“Which counts for a lot,” Indrid says.

“It counts for a lot! And—I mean, it’s not like there are a lot of places to go for grad school these days. So I did my field research, he mostly worked in the lab, we stayed out of each other’s hair.” Barclay stretches out his legs and seems to relax a little; he’s warming to the subject now. “So then I had to defend, and my secondary reader was from the psych department. Her name was Shirley and she worked with a lot of exogenes and she was a lizard-woman, first generation in her family to get a university education and she went straight to being an academic. So she comes in, we have the defense, it’s very intense because I’m explaining everything I’ve spent the past, what, five—”

“Six,” Indrid says automatically.

“Six years thinking about. But I know exactly what I’m doing. And then we’re like an hour and a half into it when Shirley asks me, ‘I notice one omission.’” He makes his voice slightly low and dry as if impersonating her. “‘Is there a reason your paper avoids so many questions of Light theory? It seems there are multiple places where the notion of Sylvain’s own preferences might have been addressed but it was carefully avoided.’”

Indrid giggles a little despite himself.

“And my advisor is on cloud nine. He keeps looking from Shirley to me, and making this face like he’s just converted an unbeliever or something. And I explained very diplomatically that I wanted to be clear about the limitations of my own research question, and how separate it was from this other related field with more resources currently dedicated to it. Very correct, very professional.

“We wrap up the conversation. They send me into the hall so they can deliberate. I have to loiter out there and read the, the comics tacked up on people’s office doors, while they decide my fate inside. Traditionally when they finish that conversation, if you’ve passed, your advisor opens the door and greets you as Doctor and that’s how you know. But that isn’t what happened. The door opens, my advisor is standing there, and he just looks at me. And there’s a moment of silence, and I start to seriously think I failed. There are about thirty seconds where I think, time to leave academia and be a lumberjack or something, because this has clearly gone horribly, horribly wrong.

“But just as I’m about to die, he says ‘Congratulations’ and then looks at Shirley and says ‘you can have him’ and leaves. Just walks down the hall and exits the entire building and leaves me and Shirley staring at each other. And that’s why I spent my first three years after graduation teaching in the psych department instead of biology.”

“Not what you’d planned on,” Indrid murmurs.

“Not what I’d planned,” Barclay confirms. “But the punchline is that a few months later my advisor lost his job for faking research results. Shirley’d been grilling him the whole time they were supposed to be deliberating over my defense. If I hadn’t kept my work so separate from his I would have been fucked. I mean, earlier than I ended up being fucked.”

“You have a lot of integrity,” Indrid says.

For some reason the compliment calls Barclay up short. He scrutinizes Indrid for a long moment and asks, “Did you know this story already?”

“Yes and no. It’s better to hear you tell it.”

“Huh.” He scrubs his hands over his face and then picks up his disguise bracelet again. “Well, uh, this is a very, very short-term solution to my whole life and career being over. But I do feel better.”

“I knew you would,” Indrid says softly.

  


When Indrid gets familiar enough with the immediate environment, he lets his visions look a little farther abroad and discovers that there are sylphs here. Surprisingly close.

There are maybe half a dozen of them in a group two or three hours’ walk away, living entirely separate from the humans. From what he sees he isn’t in a hurry to encounter them, but the choice is taken out of his hands when he sees that someone is going to come to where Barclay and Indrid are, near the gate and the hot spring. It’s only a matter of time.

The sylph ends up coming down to the spring when Barclay is emerging after his bath, back in his clothes and his human body, while Indrid sits on the ground next to the changing house with his disguise on and his back to the wall.

Barclay almost jumps out of his skin. “What the—Indrid?” He looks down at him. “Who’s this?”

The stranger tilts their head and looks at the two of them for a long moment. They’re very tall and very wide, this new person, with skin the color of granite and an interestingly irregular face partially hidden by long black hair, and wearing a bunch of woolen garments of no particular color all layered on top of each other.

“You’re not human, are you,” the person says. They manage to make this sound like a personal failing. The words are in the local language, and Indrid takes a moment to appreciate the weirdness of understanding them, the way the magic of the gateway makes the totally unfamiliar words sound perfectly comprehensible. _Mannlegur,_ they say: human.

Indrid gets to his feet. He’s been rehearsing this conversation in his head. “We’re exiles,” he says. “New ones who just came through the gate. How long have you been here?”

They laugh. They have a low, rumbly voice that makes them a little hard to understand. “Forever. I was born here. There are hundreds of us and this is our home. Why did you come?”

Barclay seems fascinated. “Hundreds of you? That is—forgive me. My name is Barclay, and this is—” He turns to Indrid to see if he’ll take over the conversation, but Indrid stays quiet. “This is my friend Indrid Cold. We’re from the city of Sylvain. You say you were born here?”

They nod. “The gate’s been open for years, but no one has come through for a very long time.”

“Well, we have.” Barclay coughs a little, politely. “I’m sorry, your name was—”

They sigh heavily. “You don’t know how it works here, do you.”

Indrid says, “Yes, well, we’re very ignorant and entirely alone. Is there some kind of help that you can offer?”

Barclay looks sidelong at Indrid then, like he’s guessing this question is a little disingenuous. To be fair, Indrid’s questions often are, but things will go even worse if he doesn’t ask the question and skips ahead to the answer.

The person tilts their head to the side and looks at them. “You’re not one of the nuisances, are you?”

“There are two of us,” Indrid says. He didn’t plan on saying that, but the inaccuracy is annoying.

“You’re not two of the nuisances, are you?”

Barclay breaks in. “I promise we won’t be a nuisance if we can possibly help it. If there’s something, anything, you can do to help us, I’d be eternally grateful. We’re barely scraping by here.”

The person laughs at what is probably a quiet volume for them; the sound resembles a small rockfall. “That’s not what I meant. But you’re probably who you say you are, all things considered, and it’s not like I can ask you for proof. That’s our job.”

“What’s your job?” Barclay asks, looking interested despite himself.

“You’ll find out. Follow me.”

In their old lives, it would have been a significant imposition to follow a stranger on a two-hour walk at short notice. Now they have nothing else in the world to do, so they go along as they’re instructed. It’s afternoon, and the light seems set to last for a long time. The three of them pick their way across some rough moor-like territory, and then some hilly bits. The stranger stays quiet the entire time. They have a bumpy, rolling gait like a rock falling down a hill.

Barclay looks like he wants to ask questions, and Indrid feels sorry for him not knowing or being able to see where they’re going. He considers sidling over to Barclay and explaining a little, but when he checks on those futures they look awkward, and anyway he’d rather not let the stranger know about his abilities.

So it’s a surprise to Barclay when they arrive at the settlement, which looks like nothing—just another valley, with more scrub and rocks—until a boulder stirs and moves and another person emerges from behind it, looking very much like the one who led them here, just a little smaller and with their woolen clothes draped around them in a different way. They look startled.

“Heiðr,” says the new person, “did you just lead some humans to the homestead for some reason?”

Another boulder moves and reveals another person, and someone seems to emerge from an invisible door in a hillside, and in short order there are half a dozen of these imposing grey figures standing around and keeping their distance.

Their guide—Heiðr, apparently—looks annoyed. “Who do you think I am? Of course not. They’re sylphs.”

The group was already quiet, but they manage to get quieter when they hear that.

“What are they doing here?” asks one of them, one of the larger ones, who has a confusing shock of fuzz on top of their head that might equally be hair, a hat, or a sleeping animal.

Heiðr seems to smile a little at that for some reason, and then the whole group launches into a discussion that Indrid can only half understand. It’s not that they’ve shifted languages, exactly; more that they are talking in elliptical terms about something he doesn’t understand. Indrid hates not understanding things. He shifts closer to Barclay and tells him, “Don’t worry, I think they’re going to provide us with documents of some kind.”

“Hm?” Barclay turns toward him. “Okay. I think I’ve read about these people. Trolls. They were hybrids, part Sylvan and part…well anyway, everyone assumed they’d gone extinct, or if they didn’t originally then they must be all gone by now, but the whole species must have emigrated to Earth in their entirety. I’ve never heard of a group doing that. Have you?”

Indrid shivers involuntarily. “I’m not really up on history.”

“I’m going to ask them when they’re done talking,” Barclay decides, and when Heiðr turns back around and opens their mouth to speak, Barclay says, “Sorry for asking, but how long have your people lived here?”

There’s some kind of expression on Heiðr’s face that’s gone too quickly to be identified. “A long time. Does it matter? Hundreds of years, about fifteen of our generations. Whatever those numbers are worth.”

“So that’s—” Barclay obviously tries to count back in time from that answer but is missing key information. “Who was the Interpreter when you left?”

“Well, we stopped saying his name when we came over, so that won’t help you either. The Pious One, we call him. Didn’t like us. Didn’t want anybody to know. Did some underhanded diplomacy and cut us off from our territory. The gate was open, there was empty space here, so we came over.”

“And no one’s ever gone back?”

“Dunno. Listen, do you care how you spell your name in the alphabet here? Once you pick a spelling you’re more or less stuck with it.”

Barclay blinks. “Oh. Uh, not really? Just phonetically, I guess.”

“Fine. You told me one name, you’ll need two; do you want to give me another one or should I make it up?”

Barclay looks uncomfortable, and Indrid feels, to his surprise, like he shouldn’t be looking; Barclay is likely not used to having a face that’s so easily read. Indrid steps in: “Make one up. Why do you ask?”

“We’re getting your paperwork in order. Or, Lella is. How old do you want to be?”

Indrid pokes Barclay in the arm. “Listen to that, we get to choose,” he says lightly, trying to be humorous.

Barclay scratches his head. “Human ages—so they mature at, what, twenty?”

“You can probably pass for about forty, if you want to.” Heiðr looks over at Indrid. “You?”

“I don’t care,” Indrid says hastily. “Just in the middle somewhere.”

“Suit yourself,” Heiðr says, and they turn around and yell, “Lella! Bring the camera.”

A troll dressed mostly in faded shades of purple comes over with a boxy black device in their hands, maneuvers both Barclay and Indrid to stand in front of one of the larger rocks, holds the device up to their face and pushes a button. They wander off again without saying a word.

Barclay and Indrid end up spending another hour just sitting on the ground while the group goes about its obscure business. Twilight falls and Lella leaves, just walking off away from everybody else without saying anything, and the rest seem to go in and out of existence, passing behind their rocks and the camouflaged doors in the hills. After a while some food smells start to permeate the air. Barclay looks wistful. Indrid feels hollow. He looks through the futures for one where they get to sit indoors and have a hot meal instead of staying here on the ground, but it’s a surprisingly hard search. He gets increasingly annoyed, watching future after future where their supposed hosts let them sit there indefinitely, and he’s in a bit of a huff when he gets up and bangs his fist on one of the rocks that seem to function as doors.

The rock scoots to the side and a stranger stares at him from behind it, quizzically. “What?”

“Can we get some food?” Indrid says. “We walked hours from our camp to get here and we’ve been borderline starving all week.”

“Oh.” The person looks behind them at the darkness beyond the stone. This one seems to be wearing a dress but Indrid isn’t ready to hazard a guess as to their gender; the whole group is too dissimilar to anybody he’s familiar with. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on guests.”

Indrid closes his eyes and waits for the wave of hunger and irritation and fatigue to pass over him before speaking again. And then he smiles. He is going to be saved. He sees Barclay lay a hand on his arm a moment before he feels it happen, and Barclay says in a gentle and placating tone, “Anything you could spare would be so very much appreciated. We really have been trying to get our feet underneath us here; it’s just bound to take us a while.”

The person behind the door looks at him for a long time, seeming less like they’re softened by his tone and more like they don’t want to sit through a guilt trip, and then they snort in apparent frustration and say, “Hang on.”

Barclay and Indrid get food; they don’t get to sit at the table, where there is, apparently, no room; but they do get to be indoors while their host ignores them and the two of them work their way through plates containing steamed vegetables and a little heap of boiled grain. It’s quite salty; Indrid guesses that the salt is for the sake of energy, a little extra bit of the earth.

It’s so awkward in that tiny house that as soon as they’ve eaten, Indrid and Barclay go back outside and face the prospect of sitting back down on the ground. “Here,” Barclay says, “lean on me,” and they sit back-to-back to prop each other up, so that at least they’re not crouching anymore. Neither of them says anything for a long while. Indrid looks up at the stars, reflecting on the fact that they are going to have to leave this place, and he’ll have to be the one to find them somewhere to go. Somewhere that’s actually prepared to take in newcomers. It’s going to take a lot of work; it’s been a long time since he’s extended his vision over any significant distance. He wants to feel angry about needing to do this, about the sorry excuse for hospitality here, about whoever got so antsy about his continued presence that they had to stick him through the gate, but he’s too exhausted to go through with getting mad. Barclay, he can tell, isn’t going to speak unless spoken to, just run his fingers over the rough grass and wait. Indrid closes his eyes and tries his best to blank his mind until the troll comes back with their paperwork.

Hours after departing, the troll who left the settlement comes back with two paper file folders and drops one in each of their laps. Indrid opens his up. There’s a birth certificate inside that declares him a native of a town called Kópavogur and assigns him a birthdate. Underneath the birth certificate is a dark blue booklet that says ÍSLAND on the cover, with a picture inside of his human face squinting into the late afternoon sun.

“I’m impressed,” he says, despite himself.

“Yeah, well, that’s what we do,” says Heiðr’s voice from somewhere, and Indrid twists around to see them standing there in the dark, hands on their hips. “You’ve got a semblance of a legal identity. Congratulations.”

“How long ago was this?” he asks, waving the birth certificate at Heiðr with his hand on the date.

“Hm? Oh—Lella?”

Lella emerges, it seems, from a hole in the ground a short distance away. “Yes?”

“What year is it?”

“One thousand nine hundred sixty-five, I think.”

“There you go,” Heiðr says. “You do the math.”

He’s meant to be around forty-six years old, then, depending on what the months mean. He hears Barclay say, “Thanks, seriously.”

“You’re more or less welcome. Have a nice life.”

They walk back toward the gate alone and spend a boring, hungry week scavenging and surviving.

  


It takes a long time to look through all the possibilities. This planet has more than its fair share of futures, not that that’s a thought he could ever explain to somebody else; and what he’s looking for is not very large. But it is distinctive, with an aura shimmering on the border of science and magic that catches his eye even from a distance.

Indrid is actually cheerful as he tells Barclay, “We have to make a decision. The winter here is very hard, and the trolls are never going to take us in. The gate is soon going to close and eventually a new one will open elsewhere. The new gate will be in a major city, in a country where we don’t know the language, without hot springs nearby; but there are ways to get underground, and they’re used to foreigners. We could stay here, but there are many futures where I can’t stay warm enough to keep awake, if I’m myself, or alive, if I’m in disguise. What do you want to do?”

Someday, Barclay will very likely ask him, “Hey, remember when you told me we had to leave Iceland? Why were you so happy?”

Indrid, with a smile: “I didn’t tell you, I asked. But I knew what was coming.”

“Would you really have died, though, if we’d stayed?”

“I was telling the truth, of course. And I knew—see, this is why I was happy; things don’t usually fall into place this cleanly or correctly. But I knew that as soon as I presented the options, you would choose to save my life.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Hot type is dangerous.](http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005370.html) Also, I should acknowledge Qpenguin's [Batteries and Holy Ghosts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16083422) for the image of Indrid being overwhelmed by visions of Earth upon going through the gate.


	3. in the halo of a streetlamp

Leaving an island country is complicated when you have no boat, no money, and a paper-thin official identity. Indrid spends a lot of time thinking through the logistics, leaving Barclay alone to forage, or keep watch, or think about all his regrets. Maybe, Barclay thinks, if he’d chosen psychology as his field in the first place he could have avoided all this, lived a respectable and useful life back home doing research that wasn’t so far off from what he’d specialized in anyway. If he hadn’t been associated with his advisor, he might never have come under official scrutiny. If he’d kept his mouth shut more carefully about the political implications of his work, then the powers that be might never have read his papers. If he’d been given one damn day to prepare before being exiled, there are a dozen people he would have talked or written to, and supplies he might have packed. He’d give his eye teeth now for a camp stove or a tent. Some warm clothes for Indrid, for that matter, if he’d known about him.

Regrets aside, Barclay wonders if there’s more he could do to help now. Indrid is bearing almost all the responsibility for their survival. He doesn’t have any ideas, though, not until Indrid strides back to their camp site looking alert and purposeful and gives him a job. Or, more accurately, tasks Barclay with getting them both jobs.

The container ship is loud, ugly, boring, and dangerous. All of that is less immediately meaningful than the fact that there are humans on board. Barclay can’t tell how Indrid feels about that—he mostly hangs back—but for himself he feels half terrified, half thrilled to be getting away with his disguise. When they get where they’re going, Indrid has warned him, the language barrier will be significant; but for now he can speak with the humans with magical fluency, and while they don’t want to chat all that much, he learns about where they’re from, where the ship is going, what they’re transporting, and a few words of the language he’ll soon need to know. They teach him numbers in the new language, how to ask directions, things like that. “You must have been a terrible student,” they tell him, “to know so little Enska.” Barclay smiles apologetically and shrugs and says things like, “It’s never too late to learn!”

He and Indrid both have work in exchange for their passage and a small amount of money. Barclay wishes, a little, that they could stay on the ship for longer. It’s not all that comfortable, but he feels like he could master such a contained environment easily. But they would need a source of energy. They brought some bottles of spring water with them, but that solution only works for a little while, and the frigid ocean they’re traveling through is not good for swimming. Besides, they have a destination.

The journey is a week long and takes them to a harbor dotted with islands, surrounded by tall buildings, guarded by a big copper statue of a woman holding a torch. There are obviously a lot of people here. A lot of possibilities. A lot of work to do to build a life.

Indrid appears a little dazed by the number of people in the city. He must have been able to see this place from afar, since otherwise he wouldn’t have known that the gate was going to open, but maybe he couldn’t see it in as much detail as he can now. The population here easily outstrips the city of Sylvain, which means it has more people than Barclay has seen in his entire life. Barclay thinks it’s possible he actually hates it. He feels slightly headachey after twenty minutes poking around and has a faint urge to cry. But there’s also something wonderful about all this gathered life, a city that isn’t founded on and ringed by collapse.

The reason they came to this city was ostensibly so they could be there when any other sylphs come through. Indrid explained it this way: the gate they came through, the one in Iceland, was more or less guarded by the trolls, who might not have provided much hospitality but did get the two of them set up and on their way. As far as he can tell from looking at the future, there isn’t anybody prepared to do the same here. There haven’t been many exiles lately—if anyone else came through the gate they did, they’re long gone—but there might be more coming. Indrid can’t tell what’s going to happen back home anymore, but he tells Barclay that he remembers having a sense that there was a storm brewing, an upheaval that might get very serious if enough circumstances came together. Poorly equipped though the two of them are to offer help to anybody else, they’re probably the only ones to take on the job.

But the gate that Indrid has foreseen hasn’t actually opened yet, so for now they’re still on their own. 

Barclay misses the Icelandic hot springs already. But the subterranean trains here offer an alternate solution. Their very first night in the city is spent in a train station that Indrid promises isn’t busy at nights, leaning against the tile wall of the platform. The energy that comes through is wan, tempered by electricity, obstructed by trains and plumbing. Barclay feels it tickling the nerves of his human body, and it’s good but it isn’t enough. “Is anyone coming?” he asks Indrid.

“Not in the next ten minutes. Go ahead, I’ll warn you.”

Barclay slips off his bracelet, and in his own form he presses himself against the tile, front first. It’s still not as good as the hot springs, and it’s a far cry from the heart of Sylvain, but he feels like he’s drinking the energy in a little deeper, and a modicum of fatigue leaves his muscles.

Next to him, Indrid leans his back against the wall. For most of the time since their arrival he’s been wearing a raggedy woolen cap that he dug up in the village in Iceland. But he’s taken it off now, and his hair is standing up around his head like a white flame. He still has that pendant Barclay noticed the first time they met. Usually he keeps it tucked into his clothes, but it has swung loose and is visible now resting against his breastbone.

Barclay doesn’t really mean to ask, but he hears himself doing it anyway:

“Why do you have a piece of the Heart of Sylvain?”

Indrid looks over at him unblinking. “I won it in a game of cards.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Indrid shrugs. “Suit yourself. You have four more minutes.”

He’s right, like usual.

They spend the night in there, neither of them really sleeping, though they take turns drowsing on benches or leaning against the tile walls while the other keeps an eye out. Indrid is technically better at watching for danger, but he spends much of the time looking for a better source of shelter.

In the morning he leads them on a long walk north, past more buildings and more people than Barclay knows how to contemplate, though there’s a weird monotony in the fact that all of them are human. They get onto a broad street with trees on one side and imposing white buildings on the other, and they walk under the trees until those run out, and then they walk past more buildings, which are still tall but look less grand and institutional. Everything is very square, with flat roofs.

“Why do we have to go this far?” Barclay asks.

“The gate is going to be in this direction. So far that’s the only definite thing I know about the future here. I want to stay close to it if we can.”

There’s food everywhere along their walk: in shop windows and on people’s plates at sidewalk cafés, hawked out of carts and vans on the street. It’s fascinating and disgusting and tantalizing and horrifying. A shocking amount of it consists of dead things. “It’s all dead things,” Indrid says, and Barclay, irritated, clarifies that he’s not upset about the dead plants, of course, he’s just a little shocked about the dead birds and fish and mammals that seem to be getting consumed all around them.

“I knew a sheep woman who walked on all fours and had to fight for her right to own property,” he tells Indrid, as he cringes away from a rather gruesome shop window display. “I thought that was unjust. But I never worried someone would _consume her body for power_.”

It’s one of the rare times Indrid seems to be at a loss for words. They walk a little further, away from the shop window, and Indrid finally says, “This isn’t the kind of thing I can really predict, but I suspect there are people who don’t eat things like that.”

“For whatever that’s worth.”

“Right, well, they must be living on something. There’s plenty of food, right? Look at this!”

They’re walking past a fruit stand. The wares look okay—less colorful than the food back home, but that’s true of most things here. The vendor stares at both of them and says nothing. Indrid sighs. “Keep moving, or buy something, but don’t try to steal anything or she’ll notice.”

He didn’t say it in English, but the vendor still seems suspicious, keeping her eyes conspicuously focused on both of them even as Barclay hands her some change in exchange for a couple of red fruits. The fruit is hard on the teeth but has some sweetness to it, and that’s nice, a sign of caloric value. They can’t live on the money from the boat for long, though.

Their trek ends at a red brick building, some five or six stories tall and much like all the others near it, whose locks give way at the first introduction of a sharp object. (“Safe,” Barclay says, watching. “We’ll take other precautions,” Indrid says.) On the third floor there’s a set of rooms standing vacant. Indrid walks them in, turns in a circle as if to make sure it’s the right one, and nods. “Welcome home.”

“Really?”

“Until it passes into someone else’s possession, yes. Which shouldn’t happen immediately. Better than a train station, at least.”

They spend that night attempting sleep while wrapped in blankets on the floor. It’s not precisely restful, but it’s about as close as anything has been since they got to this planet.

So then they have a space. To call it an apartment would be generous. There’s no private bathroom, and the shared one seems to be barely functioning. No one, apparently, is responsible for cleaning the stairwells, and it only takes a day before Barclay decides that he prefers to climb up the fire escape if he’s sure no one is watching when he jumps up to it. He’s not sure what he’s afraid of there: as far as he knows, this body is about as good at jumping as it ought to be. Probably no one would see him doing it and realize he isn’t human. It just seems like he’s breaking a rule.

After their first night there Barclay goes out again to look for food. It would be easier with Indrid, but Indrid exhausted himself finding this place; he seemed fast asleep when Barclay left. He spends a little more of his money on produce—he can read the numbers here, if not the words, so that helps—and considers that he probably needs to find work.

He’s not experienced in this area. One of the many side effects of Sylvain’s slow submission to the Quell was a drastic shrinking of both the job market and the labor force. By the time Barclay finished his doctorate, there was nowhere to use it but the same university that had granted the degree. Though there was other work too, besides research and teaching. He used to get visits from members of the Department of Preservation; once Minister Woodbridge himself showed up in Barclay’s office without an invitation and asked a few questions whose purpose he refused to reveal—questions about whether some species could survive better than others with less access to the Light. Barclay was short with him. He followed up on that conversation by sending a letter to all the members of the Council, reiterating his answer that all sylphs, whether they were Sylvan in origin or had Earth ancestors, needed the Light to live, and that rationing based on species would be a decision unsupported by science.

Anyway. He taught, he had aggravating meetings with public servants, he ran his lab, he published his results, he participated in the endless committee service and institutional conversations of university life. There was always a lot of work to do, and he never had to ask anyone for more of it, because there was almost nobody left on the planet who knew all the things he knew. (There’s another reason to chafe at his exile.)

Here he knows next to nothing, doesn’t speak the language, and has no connections. It’s not the most pleasant reversal.

“One of us has to earn money very soon,” he says to Indrid, when he gets back. “And I kind of think it needs to be me.”

Indrid blinks up at him. He’s awake, but barely; he’s made one of the blankets into a little nest where he’s sitting, and another one is draped around his shoulders. He was staring into the distance when Barclay came in.

“Why you?” Indrid says, sounding a little foggy.

“Haven’t you seen it happen already?”

Indrid rubs a hand across his forehead. “I’ve seen so many things, Barclay. If you have an idea, maybe just spell it out.”

Barclay kneels in front of where Indrid is sitting. “I’m not trying to baby you, or whatever, but it’s obviously costing you a lot to be here. Just to figure out how to survive. And I—I’m not going to pretend to be hunky-dory, but I don’t think I need the recovery time you do. I can go out and work, and then someday maybe we can afford, oh, chairs.”

“Paper.”

“What?”

“The first thing I would buy would be some pens and paper. For the…” He sticks a hand out from under the blanket and waves it vaguely in front of his face. A lot of his gestures look abortive, like he doesn’t know how to express himself with the number of limbs he currently has. “The possibilities. It’s easier to keep track when I can write or draw them and don’t have to remember how they all go.”

“We can probably afford that now.”

“Until we have money coming in, I don’t want any more going out than necessary. The futures where we go broke are awful. Also I waste a lot of paper, the way I use it.”

“Well, fine. I’ll go get a job then. I can probably…” He trails off and looks into the distance for a while, trying to think of something he’s qualified to do here. “I can lift and carry things. I was useful on the boat. Where would I go to find some work like that?”

Indrid closes his eyes and thinks about it for what seems like a long time. When he opens them he says, “Downtown. Far downtown.”

“Can I ask for help, or are you too exhausted?”

Indrid puffs out a breath and lets himself fall backward so he’s lying on his back on the blankets. “Give me a day.”

Barclay almost asks him another question, but instead he goes to fetch a piece of fruit and bring it to Indrid. He’s still prone so Barclay grabs his hand and presses the food into it.

“Thank you,” Indrid says, not opening his eyes.

“Any time.”

Once Indrid rallies himself it’s not so bad, securing a job. It’s awkward and requires several tries; small variations in their attempts at communication apparently make a big difference in the results, which in turn makes Indrid’s predictions more difficult. But once he finds the right place to try, they sign Barclay on without seeming to care much about his experience. It’s a warehouse close to where they arrived, where freight is loaded and unloaded and a lot of the other staff don’t seem to speak much English either. The boss, a small man but forceful, repeats what time Barclay is supposed to show up, speaking very slowly and loudly, and once they’re all agreed on that they go on their way. Indrid splurges on a piece of cake from a bakery to share, as a celebration, and then he eats most of it himself. He seems so embarrassed when he realizes he’s done this that Barclay makes a show of purchasing a little bag of seasoned nuts and eating them all himself, giving one to Indrid only when he says, “I see how it is, you’re already controlling the purse strings, I shall have to beg for my supper,” and Barclay feels guilty and gives in. Indrid looks at his earnest expression and laughs. Barclay smiles, tentatively.

There are some other practicalities to settle. They’ve been living without furniture; happily, people throw it out all the time here, just leave it out on the streets, and Indrid can tell pretty easily whether or not a particular item will immediately fall apart or cause a mold problem. They lug up a couch with its lining falling out, an uneven kitchen table, some mismatched wooden chairs.

Then there is the language issue. They talk about this a little bit. Barclay feels obscurely anxious; he’s never had to learn a second language from scratch, as an adult. The dialect-switching he used to do as a kid was different, and somewhat hard to think about now. He says something vague about this to Indrid, who as usual offers no personal information in response but does drum his fingers together for a while, looking thoughtful, and says, “Let me see what I can find.” And then, “You’ll do fine,” almost as an afterthought, but it’s reassuring nevertheless.

A couple days later, Barclay gets home from work and finds that Indrid has found them a series of English classes at a public library. “Nothing fancy,” he avers, “but they’re free, and we can start whenever we choose.”

The sessions are not very pleasant. The room is crowded and slightly damp, and the class is taught at night by a series of volunteers who keep quitting. But once Indrid commits to doing the work he can foresee already having done it, so he progresses fairly rapidly. Something happens when he grasps the difference between “I will” and “I’m going to,” along with the fact that English usually dispenses with both and uses the present tense to describe the future. When he tries to explain this, Barclay doesn’t really understand the nuances, but he’s happy to see Indrid enthusiastic about something.

“Let’s get out of here,” Indrid says out of the blue, some forty or fifty days after their arrival in the city, and he takes them to Grand Central Station and finds them two train tickets that fell out of somebody else’s bag.

“This is awful,” Barclay says as Indrid hands him a ticket.

“She can afford to replace them,” Indrid says. They get on the train and go all the way up to the end of the line, and they spend the night in the Waterbury station, pretending to wait for someone to pick them up.

It’s a lousy way to spend a night. “What are we doing here, Indrid,” Barclay says flatly that morning, lying prone on a bench and staring up at the ceiling. Sleeping in disguise is bizarre and un-restful, like lying down in formal wear, and it’s left him out of sorts.

Indrid heaves himself nimbly up from his position on the floor onto his feet. “There’s a huge front of polluted air rolling into the city today,” he says. “It’s going to settle over Manhattan and stay there and cause a lot of illness, and probably some deaths, although nobody’s ever going to agree on the cause and effect in all that. And there was nothing either of us could do to stop it, and our windows don’t seal and our walls are paper, and I didn’t want to be there for it, so here we are.”

Barclay watches him for a minute—his one and only friend, the inscrutable freelance prophet—and then runs a hand over his eyes and sighs. “I have to ask. Would it be better if I asked you questions about this kind of thing? Or do you need me to just go along with it?”

“You can do whatever you want.” Indrid smoothes down his clothes. “I don’t require a particular demeanor from you, Barclay. There isn’t a protocol.”

“Isn’t there?” Barclay sits up. It’s probably a bad time to have this conversation, and the wrong place, but he’s always in the wrong place these days. “Because it seems like you see through time and tell me what we have to do, and I’m very confused where I stand in that whole process.”

Indrid is looking toward the windows of the station. “You stand where you put yourself. I could tell you what other people have done when interacting with me, but frankly it would set a poor example. You never have to follow me if you don’t want to, and if you have questions, please go ahead and ask. I prefer not to preemptively answer unasked ones.” He pauses and looks toward Barclay, his expression softening a little, and adds, “I’m sorry if I’ve been bossing you.”

Barclay frowns. “What did other people do wrong when interacting with you?”

Indrid goes still, looking as if he’s been caught out, and wets his lips a few times before saying, “Actually, I’m going to decline to answer that one.”

Barclay is too exhausted to formulate a thoughtful response to that. “Okay,” he says. “So how long will the air be bad in New York?”

“A few days. I’ll find a way for us to be safe here and then we can go back.”

“Are we going to find any food?”

“I think so,” says Indrid, and he leads them out into the brave new world of a Connecticut bedroom community to look for breakfast.

Barclay does start asking questions after that. When the apartment where they’ve been squatting gets rented out and they have to move into another one, Barclay looks around the new walls warily and asks, “Is there anything I need to know about this place?”

Indrid says, “No, I don’t think so. We should have a couple months here.” He puts down his one plastic shopping bag of personal effects and says, “There’s a private shower, and it has hot water for certain parts of the day, so that’s a step up. And all the burners should work on the stove, I think.”

The weather, which Barclay found pleasantly temperate when they arrived, gets colder the longer they stay. He has an easier time with the cold than Indrid does, but it’s still a change from what he’s used to, particularly since he has to go without his customary protective layer of hair most of the time. “Is this winter, or will it keep getting colder?” he asks, and Indrid says, regretfully, “Much colder.”

Later, as Barclay tries to get up from his blanket nest on the floor but can’t seem to summon the will for it: “Is this week actually going to be awful, or am I dreading it for no reason?”

“A lot of things are going to happen,” Indrid says, “like they always do. I can’t tell you how you’ll feel about them. Later more things will happen.”

“That’s terrifically unhelpful, Indrid.”

“Yes, well, welcome to my world.”

  


* * *

  


Once Barclay has received a few paychecks, and they start to have some idea how things work here, Indrid finds that he doesn’t have to prophesy everything about their daily survival anymore. It’s a relief but it’s also a shock; he practically deflates, as if he’d been holding himself upright on the strength of the mission alone. He buys a cheap sketchbook and some pencils and spends a whole week just resting—sitting in the apartment, or sitting on a park bench, or sitting on a subway train, observing that life is going on around him, capturing scraps of it on paper but not thinking any particular thoughts about it. The only time he does anything useful is when he notices someone about to trip on an escalator and puts out a hand to steady her. She frowns at him a little but says “hm” in a way that could plausibly be interpreted as thanks. Apart from that, Indrid just lets himself drift on time and the city.

He’s getting better at understanding what he sees in the futures of this place. There is a lot of potential disaster in New York, most of it small-scale, some of it bigger. Indrid doesn’t feel safe attempting to confront most of it, but the longer he knows Barclay and the kinds of things he will and won’t do, the more comfortable he gets suggesting that they put themselves in between possible mishaps and their victims. “Let’s walk down 130th,” he says abruptly when they’re on their way home from English class.

“Isn’t that kind of dark?” Barclay asks.

Indrid takes his arm. “It is. That’s why we’re going. We’ll be all right.”

Barclay follows along, which might or might not technically count as agreeing to the plan, and they get behind a human walking up the sidewalk and stay ten paces behind her until she turns and enters an apartment building.

“What just happened?” Barclay asks, as Indrid lets out a breath and allows himself to forget what he’d seen.

“Nothing,” says Indrid, “which was the best possible outcome.” He realizes he still has his arm looped through Barclay’s, a posture he’d adopted to make them look nonthreatening, and he lets him go, patting him once on the shoulder. “I’d rather not give details,” Indrid says. “It was a very small intervention, that’s all.”

They’re a couple months into their English class, and two teachers have already vanished, when a new person shows up to teach them. She appears to be somewhere past the middle of a human life span, a little shorter than Indrid and more solidly built, with mixed black and grey hair escaping from a braid at the back of her head.

“Hello, everyone,” she says. “It looks like I’m going to be helping out here. I’m Alice. You can use my last name if you like but it’s a long one.” She turns around to look at the blackboard, hunts along the bottom of it until she finds a nub of chalk, and writes in block letters, “Alice Tarkesian.”

Alice moved here as a child from a place called Iran, but she is, as she takes care to specify, not Iranian but Armenian. She lives way, way uptown with her son and daughter-in-law and grandson. She works at several other jobs, and she helps here when she has the time because many of her friends have taken these classes and she knows how important they are.

Barclay likes her, Indrid can tell. Barclay, he surmises, likes encountering a competent teacher. At the break he goes so far as to introduce himself, which would be a surprise if Indrid hadn’t seen it coming; he thanks her for filling in and then, apparently just to make conversation, asks about the jobs she alluded to. She tries to explain but he just gets more confused.

Indrid stays out of it. If he intervened, he would eventually take over the conversation, which isn’t an optimal outcome here. Barclay deserves to talk to someone new on his own, even if he barely has the vocabulary to do it. Barclay is confused because he thinks she’s describing one job that includes both selling groceries and making intricate hand gestures along a planar surface. Indrid understands the gesture only because he can see Alice a few mornings from now, playing a musical instrument for a group of people singing along. Barclay has never seen or heard this instrument, but so far he hasn’t let on to his ignorance, which is good, since chances are it cannot plausibly be explained by his being from Iceland.

Barclay tries again. “Food?” he says, mimicking her hands.

Alice laughs, thinking that he’s making a joke. He’s remarkably unembarrassed, grinning back at her, game to resume the conversation. He must have been a tremendous teacher.

He’s a tremendous person. It’s starting to get a little alarming.

Indrid has spent a lot of time looking ahead since arriving on Earth. From studying his and Barclay’s futures he inferred there would be warmth in the relationship, even heat if they got their timing right.

But what he’s experiencing now—this lift, this overwhelming concern for Barclay’s wellbeing, this cherishing delight in the things he says—this is news, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. It’s not the kind of thing his visions can help him with. He’s known that since an early age: he can’t predict his way into happiness. Especially not where another person is involved.

What he can tell is that it isn’t time yet to say anything about it. It’s not his visions telling him that; he’s still disoriented by New York, working hard to see his way through a day, and by the time Barclay gets home from the warehouse they’re both incoherently tired. Their relationship to each other is based on necessity first, aid and comfort second, and anything else is simply crowded out.

There will, Indrid thinks, be time for that. Time enough to figure himself out, at least. In the meanwhile he watches Barclay being friendly and decent to someone he’s never met before, and he savors the feeling of being near to something precious.

Indrid’s feelings are a complication in the argument he’s been having with himself. The past months have been taxing, steering himself and Barclay through all the slim chances that keep them safe, being rewarded only with surviving to do it again; but they have also felt at some fundamental level like a waste of time. _Personal benefit is never to be the only or primary goal,_ rings one of the more obnoxious voices of his conscience, the one that always brings other voices close on its heels: _Colleagues, I regret that I can no longer—_ devolving into _what the fuck do you want from me at this point, what else do you think I can try_. Protecting Barclay ought to be enough of a purpose but it palpably isn’t, it’s just part of the same treadmill of protecting himself, so that he can—what, keep doing it, indefinitely? The futility of it all is making him hard to live with, for himself or for anyone else. He observes himself being obstreperous and difficult in most of the possible futures as well as in real time. It is, he finally admits to himself, awful. He hates even more that Barclay has no real choice but to be patient with him. Barclay is a very tolerant person, but he has the right to social interactions he doesn’t have to just tolerate.

Indrid looks carefully around the futures in the area for an excuse to go somewhere, to stop being cooped up in their squat and go out to accomplish something. He could get something done close to here, probably—there are certainly enough people in this city in need of an intervention—but getting out of the city is part of the point. It takes time, but he finds a disaster a small ways afield, small enough to easily prevent and bad enough to be well worth preventing. Over a cold supper in their rooms after a long shift, he tells Barclay, “I’m going to have to be gone for a little while.”

Barclay positively freezes. “What? Where are you going?”

“It’s not very important.”

“How can you say—is something wrong? You’re not sick, are you?” Barclay has put his fork down and is almost leaning out of his chair to get a closer look at him. “Are you getting enough energy? Is the food disagreeing with you? I have basic medical training, you know, I can help if you need it.”

“Goodness, no.” Barclay has apparently not gotten tired of Indrid’s company. That’s nice, but this would be easier if he had. “I’m not crawling into the wilderness to die; I have an errand to run. There’s a small disaster due to occur near here and I have a chance to prevent it and save a couple lives. That’s all.”

“So you’re running toward danger all of a sudden?”

“It’s not dangerous to me, just to the potential victims. But there might be no victims at all, so I’m just going to go up there and give a little nudge to events to make sure that’s the case. I’ll be fine.”

Barclay obviously wants to argue, but he sits back instead and crosses his arms. He’s still in human form and looking twitchy, the way he always does at the end of a long day in disguise.

“I’ll come back,” Indrid tells him. “I have every reason to think I’ll succeed, but even if I don’t, I’ll come back when it’s over. What else would I do?”

Barclay sighs and looks away. “It’s really awkward when you ask rhetorical questions like that,” he says quietly. “I don’t know what you would and wouldn’t do.”

It must have been difficult for him to say that, because it was likely he wouldn’t do so; Indrid barely saw it coming. He blinks and tries to find a softer way to say what he needs to say here, but there are too many possibilities, and letting this moment stretch out while he thinks is worse than saying the wrong thing. “I wouldn’t leave,” he says tentatively, “if I didn’t know you would be fine while I was gone.”

“Well that’s nice, I guess. I just— ” Barclay puts up his hands, looking frustrated. “I’m just concerned, that’s all. Is that a surprise? We’re a team. I’ve never done this without you, and you’re—I can’t just skip having feelings about that because you tell me it will be okay. That’s not something I can choose to do, no matter how much I trust you.”

He’s so ready with words like _trust_. “I don’t know how to respond to that,” Indrid admits.

Barclay raises his eyebrows and they look at each other helplessly for a moment. This must be the closest they’ve ever come to a real argument. “Well,” says Barclay. “Safe travels, I guess.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's still 1965, for anyone keeping score at home. In reality, [the smog episode described here happened the following year.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog) Chapter title is from Simon & Garfunkel's “The Sound of Silence,” first released in 1964.


	4. felt the earth move in my hand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Ewan MacColl's “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” (1957).

Being in New York without Indrid is like…

Barclay spends a lot of time trying to decide what it’s like. Working in the lab as a student when everyone else had gone home? No: that had some of this feeling of managing on his own, working without direct instruction, but that was much simpler and more purposeful than this.

It’s a little like the first time he had to make a syllabus for an entire course by himself, second-guessing every time he made a new plan instead of copying something that had been done before. By now he knows about the devices in the apartment and how to get to work and how to do his job, but it feels a little absurd that he’s allowed to do all those things without someone checking his work.

Having Indrid with him has meant that he always knows how to slip through the cracks in this city and avoid danger, eviction, awkward questions. Now, all he knows is that there probably isn’t going to be a huge catastrophe before Indrid comes back. Even then, the future changes all the time; some mischance could throw disaster into his path and he wouldn’t know what to do.

Meanwhile he misses his friend. Barclay keeps looking up when he’s at home, expecting to see Indrid coming through the door, or turning when he’s in public and hears a voice a little like his. He thinks of something funny he’d like to tell Indrid, and then he tries to remember what Indrid’s laugh sounds like, not the soft giggling he does when privately amused but the full-throated expression of delight that he rarely allows himself. Indrid is hard to surprise, and anyway Barclay isn’t all that funny a person to begin with. That laugh, though, the real one, was a joy. It started high, skittered higher and then descended into something like a bellow. Barclay can’t remember what last prompted it, but he misses it. He’s already forgotten the funny thing he wanted to remember to say.

Food is still a problem. A lot of days he eats peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. And vegetables, whatever is cheap, usually raw. Those two things don’t go particularly well together, but he doesn’t know what to do about that.

Some kind of holiday happens—there’s some negotiation, at work, about who is going to take time off and when; Barclay keeps working, having no reason to do otherwise, and people seem to be grateful. There’s a day when very few people seem to be out in the city and then, a few days later, a night when everybody is, despite the cold weather, and Barclay nervously weaves his way between the crowds on his way home. They’ve been finding apartments way uptown, a direction that he has gradually accepted is not the same thing as north although it approximates it, and Barclay’s work is way downtown. He spends a lot of time walking between the two. He wants to learn how to use the trains, but he’s had more than one dream about his bracelet falling off in crowded places, and the dreams where it happens on a crowded train car are the most terrifying. He told Indrid about this once, when asked why he insists on walking all the way to work and back.

“It’s extremely unlikely that you’re going to get torn apart by a panicked mob in a subway car,” Indrid told him.

“That’s different from a total certainty,” Barclay said.

Indrid sighed. “When you locate a total certainty, Professor, we can both marvel at having found a miracle of science.”

So Barclay still avoids the trains.

Stations, though, are his best source of energy. Usually he walks up from work and then drops into a station near home. He’s considered buying a ticket or a token or whatever they use, just to make these visits easier, but usually in an empty station it’s a simple matter to jump the turnstile and get onto the platform, where he can lean with his back against the wall and pretend he’s just tired and waiting for a train.

Indrid doesn’t come down here very often. Barclay assumes he’s getting energy from his portion of the Heart, but they don’t talk about it. Alone, now, he sits on a bench in a station underneath a university campus. He watches people come and go, guessing at who is a student, or a librarian, or a poet, or a scientist. There’s no way to verify his guesses. He really needs to get a handle on the language so he can get some better hobbies. Maybe read a book every once in a while.

Indrid is gone for about twelve days and then, suddenly, he is back. He’s just standing there when Barclay comes out of the warehouse one evening, under a sidewalk lamp with what looks like a glass wine bottle in his hand. “Success!” he says, practically crows, not even saying hello first.

“You’re back,” Barclay says stupidly, blinking. It’s dark out, or as dark as it gets in this well-lit city, and cold; Indrid’s wearing a long coat Barclay doesn’t recognize.

“I’m back, let’s walk. I brought you some spring water.”

“Where did you get that?”

“I have magic powers. Also, upstate New York.” Indrid produces a pair of disposable plastic cups from somewhere and hands them to Barclay, who wordlessly holds them out while Indrid pours water into them. “One hundred percent survival and a perfect avoidance of all awkward questions. I think that merits a celebration.”

Barclay smiles. He’s tired and still residually anxious from spending this time alone, but it’s so, so good to see him again. He hands Indrid a full cup, and then tips his own to let a ceremonial drop of water fall onto the ground. “To your success. Can I say I’m proud of you without it being weird?”

Indrid laughs out loud— _there it is_ —as he pours out a splash of his own water in acknowledgement. “Everything we do is weird forever,” he says; “we’re alien monsters in a foreign land. I’m proud of me too. There’s a child alive today who could have made her whole hometown shockingly sad, and instead she has an excellent chance of living to see her grandchildren.”

“You can see how people will feel?”

“That kind of mourning I can see. I don’t want to stand still, let’s walk toward the water.”

So they do. Barclay sips his mineral water; it tastes like iron and carries a tiny zing of energy into his core. Indrid babbles a little about everything except the purpose of his mission, like how he traveled north without attracting attention, and how at one point he passed himself off as a used car salesman.

“A what?”

“You know, cars, those vehicles they use here. I pretended to sell used ones.”

“I know what cars are, but how did anyone let you sell them? You barely even speak the language.”

“Nobody let me do anything. I simply hung around the lot pretending to work there. I got hold of a very loud necktie—I’ll show it to you. Anyway the goal wasn’t to sell anything, it was just to influence one particular family not to come back the next day, because there was going to be a mechanical disaster.”

“And how did you manage that?”

“Eh.” Indrid turns his face away at that. “I had to play a slightly distasteful role for that part, but it worked, so there you go. Ends, means. How have you been?”

“Oh. Uh, fine. Weird.” He chews on the next thing he wants to say and decides just to say it. “It’s been weird not having you here. Like I had to go around with one arm tied behind my back.”

Indrid chuckles a little. “Try actually losing half your limbs and tell me how similar it is.”

“I mean, I’ve been relying on—on your visions a lot, since we arrived. I knew you were doing a lot but it was a shock to realize how much. It’s probably good, though, for me to figure out how to do all this alone. Just so I know.”

“I thought so.”

They walk aimlessly toward the south end of the island. Indrid is humming softly under his breath, a song Barclay might have heard once. “It’s called ‘Little Mirra,’” he says, apparently catching a question before Barclay asks it. “Old song from the Croft Islands.”

“Did you ever go there?”

Indrid blinks rapidly a few times, and it seems like he’s deciding whether to answer. “About a hundred and fifty years ago. I had, ah…a relative who needed to evacuate. She had a large collection of phonograph records and gave them to me for safekeeping.”

Barclay sips his water and wonders whether to believe this story. Surely it should matter whether it’s true; it matters on what terms the two of them communicate. But Barclay isn’t in the mood for figuring that out. Instead he asks, “What’s the song about?”

“Oh,” Indrid says, tipping his head back to look for the moon. “It’s about a child. Magical child who’s going to go on to accomplish great things, you know the type.”

“Will you sing it for me?”

Indrid meets his eyes and they look at each other, some kind of challenge passing between them for a long moment, before Indrid cracks a half smile and obliges. His singing voice is odd, a little creaky, and the language is antiquated enough that the lyrics don’t make much sense, but the melody is the most Sylvan thing Barclay’s heard since his exile. He closes his eyes and holds onto that, the sound of something approximating home, lets it wrap around him like a blanket made of cobweb.

A few weeks after Indrid’s return to New York, Alice invites them to dinner. At least, she invites Barclay. Alice understands that the two of them came to America together, but it’s not at all clear what she thinks their relationship is. English doesn’t have plural and singular “you,” and when she invites Barclay her eyes go to Indrid for a moment, but she doesn’t clarify whether he’s also invited.

“She’ll never say either way,” Indrid says. “If you ask, she’ll say it’s fine for me to come, whether she means it or not, so it’s really up to you.”

“I don’t see why it isn’t up to you,” Barclay says. “Do you _want_ to come?”

Indrid falters. It seems to be hard for him to simply decide if he wants something, rather than predicting whether it will happen. “I don’t know,” he finally says, and Barclay says firmly, “Well, you need to eat, so I think you should come.”

Barclay learns the word “meat” in order to tell Alice that he doesn’t eat it. She waves a hand at this and says it’s no problem, she’ll be getting an early start on food for—well, he doesn’t know who or what Lent is, but she seems certain that she can cook something he can eat. He thanks her and asks if he can bring anything and she tells him no, so he asks Indrid what will happen if he brings something anyway.

“Depends,” Indrid says. “She’s not serving wine if we don’t bring any, and if we do she’ll act awkward about whether to open it. Flowers, she’ll put them out but she’ll make fun of you a little. Apparently you don’t know how to make any food to contribute to the meal that won’t just sit off to the side all night.”

“Can you answer this question a little more kindly?”

“No.” He looks slightly amused. “I recommend some fruit. I can find where it will be cheap.”

Barclay doesn’t manage an actual fruit basket, but he ties a little ribbon around the bag of oranges he hands over to Alice when they arrive, and as far as he can tell she’s genuinely grateful when she accepts it and ushers him and Indrid into her apartment.

It’s a little apartment, and it looks as if the general mess has been shoved back rather than cleaned away—there are a lot of lumpy shapes against the walls covered with plastic tablecloths. The cloth on the table is a little nicer, a cream-colored one with a textured weave that Indrid lingers over, running a hand across the table and looking down as if to avoid conversation. Barclay decides to leave him alone, and he follows Alice back into the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asks, pointing in the general direction of the stove, because he can’t remember whether it’s correct to talk about “making” food or if there’s a different verb.

She laughs a little. “English practice! Okay. This is kufteh, there is no English name for it. With peanut butter. This is eggplant; over here is—you know chickpeas?”

Barclay doesn’t know chickpeas, though when he says so he hears a snort from behind him.

“What?” he asks, turning around. Indrid is in the kitchen doorway watching him talk to Alice, holding one hand over his mouth.

“Nothing,” Indrid says in English. “Just—chickpeas. Important, I think.”

That seems either meaningless, fraught with significance, or both. Barclay decides it’s best to leave that alone for now.

Alice’s family are mostly away—work, always work, she says—but while she’s pouring water for everyone, the apartment door opens and Barclay looks over to see a young man come in and hang up his satchel on a coat hook next to the door.

“Here you are!” Alice says, coming out of the kitchen and practically shooing Barclay in front of her. “This is my Leo! Leo, here are my friends, Mr. Cold and Mr. Barclay.”

“Call me Indrid,” says Indrid, holding out a hand to shake.

“Sure,” says Leo. It seems like Indrid holds onto his hand for a little too long, based on how Leo has to pull back a bit to extract himself, but he doesn’t change his facial expression as he turns to Barclay. “So you’re…?”

“Oh, uh.” Barclay looks pointedly at Indrid, trying to communicate _you’ve made this awkward_ , but Indrid gazes at him levelly and does not react. “Barclay. Just Barclay is okay.”

“Okay,” Leo says, dropping Barclay’s hand smoothly. “Well, I’m Leo, but you know that already. Where are you two from?”

“I am from Iceland,” Barclay says. It’s one of the first sentences he memorized, back on the ship. 

“Huh, really? Wouldn’t have guessed. Both of you?”

Barclay looks at Indrid again, not sure he understands the question, and Indrid just shrugs.

“I mean,” Leo says, apparently recognizing that look, “you’re from Iceland, and he’s from Iceland.”

“Oh! Yes.”

“Cool. Whaddaya do here in New York?”

“Uh,” Barclay says. He knows how he should answer the question, but he’s distracted by wondering about the English for _scientist_ or _evolutionary biology_ or _kicked out in inexplicable disgrace even though I had tenure_.

Alice retreated into the kitchen at some point during this stilted conversation, and she calls something to Leo now that Barclay can’t quite make out. Leo goes into the kitchen to answer her. Barclay sidles over to Indrid and hisses, “You could have warned me I’d need a first name.”

“This has come up before; do you still not have an answer?”

“I had a _childhood_ name, and I’m not giving that to a stranger. It’d be like asking him to call me ‘baby boy.’”

“Well, make one up in the future if you want to stop having that conversation. But I don’t think this kid is going to ask you again.”

“Is he actually a kid? He acts like an adult, but he looks like a Sylvan primary schooler.”

Indrid thinks about it for a minute and then admits, “I don’t know. He is going to get older, probably. I mean, it’s not especially likely he’ll die anytime soon, and if he doesn’t, he’ll look older later.”

“That’s enormously helpful, thanks.”

When they actually sit down to dinner, it’s nice. The food is the most varied they’ve had since arriving on the planet, and plentiful. Leo rolls his eyes and makes some comment about the quantity, about Alice’s desire to feed people as much as she can, but Barclay is grateful. He’s been hungry. Indrid tries everything and finds a few things he likes; he eats quite a few of the little balls of dried fruit and nuts. Alice says something to him about having a sweet tooth. Indrid looks startled for a moment, then smiles and says something about her trying to mother him, which makes Barclay feel unaccountably sad, but Alice seems to find it charming.

Barclay, to avoid subjects he will have to lie about, talks about the food. Alice has a lot to say about it. Leo and Indrid end up spending a lot of the dinner eating silently, while Alice explains about what she tells Barclay is called _vegetarian cooking_. It’s a lot of syllables but he’ll work on it. She explains about lentils and chickpeas and nuts and split peas. Barclay asks for some paper and takes notes. At one point Indrid discreetly moves a glass so that it blocks everyone else’s view of the notepaper, and Barclay realizes he’s been writing in Sylvan characters. No one else seems to notice.

“Did you cook for yourself back home?”

Barclay blinks and tries to think of a neutral way to answer the question. “We had a…room, at work. For food.”

“A cafeteria?”

Barclay shrugs; that’s a new word. “Okay. So, two meals there, most days. Other times, at home, I ate—easy food.”

“Bachelors!” Alice says. “You think you don’t need to learn these things, but you do.”

He really didn’t, before. Sylvain provided. He gets lost in thought for a moment trying to remember the exact taste of the shieldroot sticks he used to eat in raw handfuls—crisp and dry with a vaguely bitter aftertaste. There was little need for cooking back home, if you didn’t want to do it; it just added a degree of decorative separation between you and the planet that sustained you.

“I don’t know how you avoid meat if you don’t cook for yourself,” Alice tells him. “You need to learn.”

“I do,” he says. It’s as true as anything he’s said here. Something to learn. He can do that.

They go back to their routines after that, but the routines are very gradually expanding and getting more varied. Indrid is experimenting with new disguise items. A plant called hemp, apparently, has become popular for some uses around here, so he weaves them each a little bracelet out of that and enchants it. (“Will it change my disguise?” Barclay asks, and Indrid stares at him for a moment, confused by the question, and then clarifies that of course Barclay will look the same no matter what his disguise item is, how does he think this works, and Barclay throws up his hands and says he has no idea how it works, and Indrid shrugs, but he also smiles.)

There’s something else different about him since he came back from his little mission, but it’s hard to put a name to it. Indrid’s human form has usually looked a little off-center, a little like a costume that wasn’t fitted correctly. But there’s a certain ease in his movements lately, like he finally has some idea what to do with the body he has. His eyes still look tired, and his clothes are still a horrid mismatch of castoffs—more of them all the time, like he’s been going out and digging them out of the trash—but he seems to need less time out of disguise, and he has more patience for Barclay’s questions about the future.

Barclay works long days at the warehouse, and he walks up to their apartment at the end of the day looking forward to seeing Indrid; and especially on the days when Indrid is happy or has some story to tell, it’s such a relief to walk in and see that weird smile and to have no secrets. Barclay is getting used to spending longer times in his human body, but it’s a blessing, still, when he doesn’t have to. When the two of them trade English phrases with each other, it’s not an act of subterfuge, just practice, and when Barclay can lapse into Sylvan to explain what he means, it’s like he’s tripped but fallen into a safety net. They catch each other. Nowadays it’s the only safety he knows.

So it makes perfect sense to like Indrid. It’s less of a foregone conclusion that he should _want_ Indrid; though after almost a year of exile, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that those feelings have latched onto the only viable target. Indrid is lanky in a way Barclay hasn’t usually found compelling, but he’s also incredibly expressive; there’s that baffling eloquence that suffuses his gestures. He isn’t much of one for touching, but it’s sweet when he allows it. Barclay finds himself wondering how much closer he could get, what kind of contact he might dare.

He’s a little worried about making their friendship less stable. But he’s managed that problem before. For years his world has been too small for old dates, hookups, whatever, to go very far away; when things lapsed, they always just turned back into friends and acquaintances. He inevitably saw them around, sometimes even collaborated with them at work.

And then, maybe it won’t lapse. Maybe they can simply comfort one another and it will be all right.

What does Indrid already know about all this? If Barclay is going to take some action here, then Indrid has probably seen it happen by now. Maybe that’s the source of those smiles. For that matter, if Barclay just hangs around intending to make the first move, maybe he won’t have to actually do it.

Sue him for being a scientist, but he pushes that question as far as he can. He sits in their living room on the morning of his day off, listening to Indrid pacing the apartment and talking about the weather or something. He thinks very intently about kissing Indrid until he’s as close as he can come to deciding to do it, until Indrid finally interrupts his own babble with an “Oh for MERCY’S SAKE,” swoops upon where Barclay is sitting on the couch, and does it himself.

It is immediately evident that this is the first time Indrid has tried to kiss somebody with his human mouth. He explores and probes like he’s still got a proboscis; it seems as if he’s trying to taste Barclay’s teeth.

Barclay pulls back a little and disengages enough to say, “Hold on, hold on.” Indrid is still on his feet; Barclay tugs him by the arm down onto the couch and kisses him simply on the lips, aiming for something sweeter. Indrid relaxes a little and they try that for a while, warm and quiet in the morning sun.

When Indrid breaks the kiss he looks toward Barclay’s face but his eyes are focused somewhere else, and his voice is a little hoarse as, “Oh,” he says. “Oh, this will always have happened.”

Barclay takes a minute to process that sentence. “Of course? That’s a tautology, Indrid.”

“I mean.” He lifts a hand and flutters it in the air a moment, like he can’t decide whether to touch Barclay or not, and finally folds his hands together in his lap, looking away. “I mean, I don’t think there are any futures where I just forget about it.”

“So don’t.” This feels like an important conversation, but Barclay can’t tell what it’s about. “Do we have to talk about the future right now? Is there something you need me to know, or can we just…” His hand is still on Indrid’s upper arm, in a posture that looks a little too grasping now that he pays attention to it. He tries laying it over Indrid’s heart instead, and Indrid catches his breath in a way that might indicate arousal or could mean that he’s about to cry. “If you mean this is a terrible idea and you regret it, can you just nod?”

Indrid shakes his head. “I wouldn’t have done it if it were a terrible idea.” He looks back at Barclay and, apparently noticing his concern, leans in and kisses him again, just briefly. “It isn’t a terrible idea. It’s just that I can’t pretend it isn’t important. It changes things, a lot of things, and that much shifting, that much falling into place, always feels like—like a catastrophe, even when it’s good.” Something in his expression shifts. “Even when it’s really good.”

Barclay was rather counting on some things staying the same, but it seems like an awful moment to say so. He studies Indrid’s face. There’s the tiny beginning of a smile there and Barclay wants to protect it, shield it with his hands like the first spark of a fire. “I really missed you when you were gone,” he offers.

“Apparently so.” Indrid takes a deep breath. “Most of the people I’ve ever known would yell at me for being ironic and mysterious at a time like this.”

“Okay. That’s on them. I don’t feel like yelling at you.”

“You really don’t, do you.” Indrid drops his eyes and says quietly, “There is such a good chance that I’m going to hurt you.”

It’s not clear there’s any good response to that. “But not a guarantee?”

“I don’t think so. It’s—oh, it’s hard to explain. Feelings in the future…” He trails his fingers through the air. “They’re not like events; I can’t actually see them. I have to guess how things will feel, especially for other people.”

“So I can’t ask if we’re going to regret this.”

“You can ask all you want, I just don’t know. I mean—even in the present it’s not easy to see these things, is it? I’m not sure you can tell that I’m happy right now.”

He couldn’t, it’s true. Indrid looks cautious, maybe a little embarrassed; but that spark of a smile is still there. “I think,” Barclay says tentatively, “that at this point it would hurt more to try to laugh this off or ignore it than it would to proceed.”

Indrid smiles at him archly, and for the first time Barclay really dares to believe that he isn’t regretting the whole day so far. “To _proceed_ , Doctor Barclay?”

“Yes.” Barclay grins back and puts his hands on either side of Indrid’s face. “To see the experiment through.”

“If this is how you treat your subjects,” Indrid says, but he cuts off his own sentence by going in for another kiss.

  


* * *

  


Indrid is too happy to worry about whether he’s doing this right. It’s as if he’s finally unwrapped a present that he has been saving for months. For the first time in this earth-bound body, he feels utterly buoyant.

Simultaneously, Indrid is aware that when he said this changed things, it was a little bit of a misstep; that if he tries any sweet names on Barclay he’ll be met with surprise; and that if they stay on this couch and try to take things any farther, the matter of bodies is quickly going to get a lot more complicated. Either they stay in human form, or they change back and Barclay gets over-conscientious about watching out for Indrid’s wings. In either case Indrid would be mixing up the order in which he ought to do things.

Indrid breaks away and leans his forehead against Barclay’s shoulder for a moment, and Barclay twirls his fingers through the hair at the nape of Indrid’s neck and lets him think. Indrid has too many things he needs to say; this isn’t the right time to say them; he wants, very badly, not to withdraw and act mysterious right now. They need time, some different kind of time. It is Barclay’s day off. They live in a large and extraordinary alien city. Indrid laughs a little and then says, talking to the top of Barclay’s arm, “Can I take you out somewhere?”

They go to the museum of natural history. It’s one of Indrid’s easier tricks, figuring out when the security personnel will and won’t be checking for the little metal tabs on their clothes to indicate that they’ve paid admission. They stroll into the galleries in plain sight and it’s almost like they’re not sneaking at all.

Indrid’s not terribly interested in the contents of this museum. He thinks he should be—there is so much information here about Earth and the way its systems fit together. But there is no one waiting for him to file a report on all that, and anyway much of it is focused on ancient history. He can’t think too hard about the deep past. Doing that has felt, ever since he learned to see the future, like standing in the middle of a set of mirrors reflecting each other into eternity.

Barclay’s fascinated, though. “The techniques are distasteful,” he says, about the taxidermy. “But I know things are different here, between people and...everyone else, and at least it’s for science.” He knows the word _animal_ by now, but it seems like he doesn’t want to use it. It doesn’t correspond perfectly to anything in their native language—the closest thing is a word that really means “forerunner.” Or “alien,” but he probably never used that one to begin with. 

They spend a long time wandering through the galleries, Barclay trying very hard to understand the explanatory plaques. Indrid listens to him while keeping his mind off the past by looking at specific, present things like the color of some birds’ eggs, and the texture of various diorama landscape elements, and the posture of an animal called a beaver as it walks on its hind legs to carry a load of sticks in its arms. The beavers look intelligent from the way they’re arranged, all of them working together to build a house that’s halfway underwater.

“If this planet doesn’t have anything like the Light,” Barclay says, squinting at the plaque about the beavers, “then the only sort of evolution they have would be life forms constantly force-testing a bunch of random mutations for survival effectiveness. And sexual advantage, probably.” Indrid blushes a little, stupidly, but Barclay isn’t paying attention. “It’s kind of brutal,” he continues, “but I can’t imagine how much more rational the whole discipline must be here. No arguing about Sylvain’s will and how it reveals itself, just tracking adaptation to an environment as it changes over time.”

Indrid has a vague indication that if Barclay says that to a native of this planet they will laugh in his face, but it’s hard to know why—the whole scenario is improbable enough that he only sees it for a moment—so he disregards that for the time being and looks at more immediate possibilities. Barclay will probably want to keep looking around. Two stories up, there is a hall of preserved bodies of some large apes, and Barclay is going to try a few times to say something about his feelings on that, but he probably won’t succeed. Indrid could steer them away from that floor, but he’s trying very hard to let Barclay make the decisions about this outing. Instead Indrid looks at the plaque himself and comments, “I think it says they used to make these creatures into hats. I’m not sure I understand how that would work.”

“Or why,” Barclay agrees.

“It seems barbaric.” Indrid is actually trying to get at a more specific thought than that, but it has something to do with death and time and dominion, and he thinks that it will be depressing if he does manage to say it. He takes half a step back from the beaver diorama, just enough to signal that he’s ready to move on whenever.

“Where in the world are we, anyway?” Barclay says.

“What?” Sometimes it’s hard to follow Barclay’s train of thought.

“I just mean, there are a lot of ecosystems in this one wing, and I wonder how much ground we’ve covered out of the total. Is there a map or something around here?”

“Oh. There’s, um, an astronomy area. If you want to see more about that.” He isn’t exactly steering Barclay away from the primate room—he’s not saying anything about that, so no one could accuse him of controlling the conversation.

“Maybe in a bit. I don’t need the whole solar system yet.”

“Okay,” Indrid says, sounding subdued even to himself, and this time Barclay seems to notice because he shoots him a slightly concerned look. Indrid forces a smile, although he knows that people find it creepy when he does that, and looks ahead for a future where they find a world map. It takes some doing. The two of them follow Indrid’s intuition in and out of several galleries and he finally finds them a large wall-mounted world map in the anthropology department.

“Oh,” Barclay says when he sees it. His arms hang down by his sides, limp.

“It has to be the same size as Sylvain,” Indrid says. “In total. Otherwise the gravity would be off.”

“Right, of course.”

The map shows multiple continents covered all over with political boundaries, nations and cities and a name for every island. Evidence of habitation everywhere.

“I mean, I knew,” Barclay says, stumbling over his words a bit. “Of course it’s the whole world. They live in the whole world, I mean. I just didn’t really think about it as…I hadn’t thought about what that looked like.”

It’s easy to know what they’re both thinking about: the city of Sylvain and its protective walls; the settlements around it that have been drawing closer for decades; the wilderness and ruins and oceans beyond that, stretching for distances it would take months to cross. All of it empty now. Their moribund homeworld, huddling around its own heart for survival.

Barclay looks horribly, horribly sad, and Indrid tentatively puts a hand on his back. “They have a lot of problems of their own here,” he says. “Very serious ones. Still, sometimes…”

Barclay takes in a breath that sounds like a hard decision and looks down at Indrid. “Sometimes?”

“Sometimes it’s unbearable how they go on without even knowing. One wishes there were less of a need to hide.”

Barclay settles an arm around Indrid’s shoulder. It’s a chilly day both outside and in these stone halls, and for a moment Barclay’s warmth feels like the Heart, in the old days, whole and healthy. Indrid keeps his gaze fixed on the map and lifts his free hand to point out the island where they arrived, the island where they are now. “There’s our route so far,” he says.

“The shortest part of it.”

“The terrestrial part.” Indrid allows himself to lean into that warmth. “And we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm indebted to [The Armenian Kitchen](https://www.thearmeniankitchen.com/) for food information, and to Liz Gilbert for her thoughts on how [good things can feel like cataclysms.](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/234/say-anything/act-four-1)


	5. trust the sanity of my vessel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things become clear. Last chapter in this particular section of the story.

It’s a strange summer.

Hundreds of years have passed since the last time Indrid fell in love. Too many things to count have changed since then, but the strangest now is how much and how little Barclay knows him. Indrid had so little to disclose the last time around. Now there is more than he knows how to tell, and when he thinks about trying to explain, the possible attempts knock together in his visions. He sees himself telling versions of his personal history that are spun to elicit sympathy, outrage, affection, concern; but the common thread, almost every time, is Barclay’s surprise. His confusion. All of it contrasts jarringly with how familiar the two of them are in the day-to-day, how comfortable they’ve grown in the last year with casual closeness, the trust around which they’ve built their meager lives here.

All of this might fall apart. Discerning the general shape of the future, rather than particular events, is awkward; and anyway nothing is settled. Indrid is going to remain who he is regardless, solitary and particular and odd, and there are few futures where the two of them part ways entirely; beyond that, anything is possible.

The present Barclay doesn’t pry. At most he asks offhand about the elements of Indrid’s past he already knows. He’s most interested in the crafting of magical items, and how that works on this alien world. “There’s life in this planet,” Indrid tells him, “and it’s willing to cooperate. It’s less companionable than Sylvain’s energy, but that was so broken anyway, and at least the Earth hasn’t had its heart torn out.” He tilts his head at Barclay and, glancing ahead a moment in the conversation, learns something he didn’t know. For form’s sake, he goes ahead and asks the question: “Do you remember her?”

“Sylvain? I was born after that happened.”

“Ah.” Indrid looks down at his hands. He’s sitting at the table they hauled up from the curb, tightening the screws on a pair of sunglasses he picked up from a street vendor. They’re stylish in the way of terribly cheap knockoffs, with little circular red lenses that tint the world very slightly when he puts them on. The coverage they provide is minimal, just enough to make him feel a bit of protection both from the sun and from being looked at. He’s considering making the sunglasses into a replacement disguise item—he feels somewhat hampered by bracelets. “Well. I couldn’t talk to her directly, of course, but it was easier, before. Everything was, but using magic in particular. You asked for it and she provided, or didn’t, and if it didn’t work it was because of her inscrutable will. Nowadays working Sylvan magic is just working with her ghost, traces she left behind.”

“And here?”

“Here it’s like asking a favor from someone who’s sleeping. Earth will respond, though, if you ask persistently enough.”

Barclay sits in the other chair and scoots it closer to Indrid’s, takes the glasses and gently places them on Indrid’s face. Barclay’s attention, when he really focuses it, is like a kinder, warmer version of a spotlight. Indrid looks back at him and tries not to succumb to stage fright. It would be very easy to keep saying melancholy things about magic and let the moment go to waste; or to blurt out a declaration of love, which would ruin things in its own way. Indrid almost puts a shushing hand over his own mouth, and then, remembering that he can, he instead uses it to brush some of Barclay’s hair back from his forehead. It’s getting ever so slightly shaggy.

“Have you ever in your life had a haircut?” he asks, trying to make it sound affectionate and not mocking.

“Oh.” Barclay blinks at him. “Honestly, no. I never, uh. Needed one.”

“If you keep wearing the illusion, it’s going to start showing the passage of time. Human hair keeps growing to an indefinite length; it doesn’t just shed when it gets too long.”

“I guess I’ll keep that in mind.” Barclay raises his eyebrows. “Are you trying to talk science to me, or are you flirting?”

“I’m not sure I know the difference,” Indrid admits as he closes the distance between them.

Indrid is good at thinking about two things at once, which means that while he is kissing Barclay (he is reasonably certain he’s getting better at this, though it’s possible that Barclay has just gotten better at responding), he considers what he needs to say. Barclay has become accustomed to following Indrid’s lead. It’s going to take some work to alter that, after effectively grabbing him the moment they met and yanking him into place, after staking both their lives on his ability to guide them. 

“It’s difficult,” he tries to say, pulling back and breathing a little fast, “for me to act where I haven’t—looked—”

“What?” Barclay says, sounding distracted.

“I mean there are rules, I don’t look ahead at everything, so it’s hard to—”

Barclay pushes the glasses up to the top of Indrid’s head and then strokes a finger down the side of his face, like he’s investigating his jawline, and it takes rather a lot of willpower to get through the clarification: “I don’t commit voyeurism, is what I’m saying, which means I haven’t seen—I don’t know what—”

Barclay laughs, sounding absolutely delighted. “Are you saying I get to surprise you?”

“My…” Indrid swallows an endearment and smiles back at him, helpless. “I think I’m saying you’re _bound_ to surprise me.” He ducks forward and lands a kiss in the first available spot, which turns out to be the tip of Barclay’s nose. “Just not—ugh. Not yet. I have to…not yet.”

“There’s no hurry. World’s not ending anymore.”

“That’s not really relevant,” Indrid murmurs, but he doesn’t press the point. The restless engine in his mind is still running.

New York is a city of islands, which makes it a city of bridges. Indrid goes for a lot of walks these days, and he looks for the bridges as if for a means of escape. There were reasons to come here, but he would have preferred not to be in a city that’s so penned in, or for that matter a place with so very many futures. On a morning’s walk he goes by a dizzying number of impending deaths, bankruptcies, love affairs, divorces, professional and artistic disappointments, come-from-behind successes, temper tantrums, unhoped-for reconciliations, international moves, good meals, petty recurring arguments—the list goes on forever. Indrid can see these things, but that doesn’t empower him to do anything about them, and anyway for the most part it’s just life continuing on, experiences that people have to go ahead and have. He still intervenes in little immediate matters sometimes, but mostly, he keeps an eye on the major structures. The bridges are sound, as far as he can tell. Construction sites are riskier. Once or twice he steps into one of those and distracts someone out of the line of danger.

He tries looking farther afield. The Brooklyn Bridge is open to people on foot, and he takes a sketchpad and spends part of one day standing at the midpoint of the pedestrian walkway, looking toward the horizon, drawing and examining the futures out there. The greater the distance, the easier it is to let small events fall out of view and focus only on the major ones. He sees a lot of popular unrest—protests, riots, rallies. Possibly there might be a war going on, but he can’t see far enough to witness the fighting, and he shivers a bit and pulls himself back from the attempt. He looks for a long time at his own drawing of an odd vessel with a few people inside, and eventually he concludes that it’s a vehicle for off-planet travel—too short-range to be of any practical interest, alas. Various hurricanes and tornadoes await their season, but it’s hard to predict those precisely. The people here probably have weather forecasting, anyway. And they already know about the politics and war.

He’s up on the bridge for a couple of hours before it finally catches his attention: another bridge, of course. There was probably an echo of it attracting him to come up here. Indrid grabs hold of the handrail and leans out away from the distractions of people and vehicles. It’s off to the west, he thinks, or the southwest. Its echoes are loud even though, as he looks farther and farther ahead to try to find it, he sees that there is more than a year before it is due to happen. There are very few futures where the bridge stays up. It’s a case in need of outside intervention. He does a little charting in his sketchbook: a month is not nearly enough time to prevent it; two to four months would increase his chances by only a small margin…he watches various scenarios run forward, and the few paths to success have to start quite soon. It’s summer now; if he’s in earnest, he should begin no later than early autumn. It’s daunting, but it’s possible, and it’s the first opportunity to do good at a really large scale that he’s had for a long time.

 _We could both go there_ , he thinks. He can see that. It’s not the most promising available option. This will need to be secretive, and two people are harder to hide than one; plus it would involve telling Barclay what to do all the time, just when he’s gained some autonomy here. And asking him to uproot himself yet again, for reasons that have little to do with him, is ethically dodgy, especially when his involvement is unlikely to help much.

And now that things between them have changed, what would Indrid really be asking? Or offering? He blinks into the wind and draws his vision back from the future; he’s made himself distracted. The situation with Barclay is a test of his long-developed patience. There must be a way through what is necessarily coming, but every time he sees a future with anything like judgment in Barclay’s face he shies away from looking at it further.

Now that he’s found a task, it’s already almost certain he’s going to take it on. He can, if he looks very hard, see himself coming back. But what will happen after that is too small and far away to discern.

  


* * *

  


Indrid is acting odd. Odd, that is, by his own standards; clingy and withholding at the same time; affectionate in an oddly undemanding fashion. If he’s home when Barclay returns from work he hugs him and won’t let go for minutes at a time, not saying anything.

“Do you need to talk about something?” Barclay finally asks, feeling a little like he’s blinked first in the staring contest they’re apparently having.

Indrid says, “Yes,” but he doesn’t elaborate, just stays in the embrace with his face hidden against Barclay’s chest. It still feels odd to get so much contact from him, after all those months of hovering distance.

“Do you need to talk about something _now_?” Barclay tries.

Indrid huffs out a tiny breathless laugh and says, “It can wait a little longer.” He unwraps his arms and gets his fingers up under the hem of Barclay’s shirt, a tiny exploratory gesture. He flicks his eyes up to Barclay’s face. “Is this all right?”

“It’s—yes. You have to already know I’m going to say it’s fine.”

“I do, but it’s important to ask,” Indrid says, sounding a little distant.

“You could have more…more permission than that, you know,” Barclay says, wishing that for once they could have a conversation that wasn’t imbued with so much gravity. The only times they’ve managed to talk lightheartedly were when Indrid started it. He has a way of setting the tone and keeping it there; Barclay has caught himself wishing he could do that half so effectively, for teaching purposes, and then he always gets distracted by remembering that he won’t be teaching anyone again. Even now, Indrid’s slow, cautious thoughtfulness has infected him, when he meant to—what? His hands are resting at the small of Indrid’s back. He traces one finger up the protruding knobs of his spine and Indrid shivers a little, looking up at Barclay with his mouth half open like he’s reaching for something to say.

“Seriously,” Barclay says, “what is this about?”

“Making up for lost time,” Indrid says.

“Past time or future time?” Barclay asks. He means it to be playful, but Indrid deflates a little bit.

“Both, I’m afraid.”

“Wait.” Barclay steps back to see his face better. “Really?”

“You’re—okay. I have something to tell you.”

“Can we do this over food? I’m starving.”

“I figured you would be. Yes, okay, go ahead.”

It’s hot in the apartment, and the fan they picked up off the curb only runs at half speed. So the kitchen gets uncomfortably filled with steam as Barclay boils water for pasta and Indrid, who isn’t nearly as interested in food but seems eager to contribute in some way, does something to some slightly gone-soft vegetables.

“So,” Barclay says.

“So,” Indrid echoes. He scoots the vegetables around in the pan. Neither of them likes this type of vegetable very much, but they’re easy to find this time of year. “I’m not—I should have said at the outset, I’m not in danger. I don’t think either of us is.”

And he tells Barclay about the bridge.

“It is going to take longer than last time,” he says.

“How much longer?”

“I don’t really know.” Indrid doesn’t look up. “Maybe a month, maybe two.”

“Can’t you see when the event is going to happen?”

“I can, that’s the thing. It’s not coming for another year.”

Barclay’s hands abruptly stop what they’re doing. A year. A year, without Indrid. A wild panic snakes its way into his stomach and he sets his palms flat on the counter.

Indrid finally looks up and sees him bracing himself. “I hope I won’t have to stay that long,” he says, conciliatory. “If I play my cards right, I can fix it early and come back much sooner than that.”

“Okay, but…” Barclay tries to stop thinking about what it would be like to spend a year alone in this city, but it’s hard. He’s not sure if what he’s feeling is actually worry, or something closer to offense; the fact that Indrid thinks he can go away like that seems like a blow, something curiously close to an insult. “I don’t understand. You might not _have to_ stay that long? Why would you have to do any of it?”

“I have a—there are a lot of people involved in this. Now that I’ve seen it, if I just stand by, it’s…like being the only doctor at the site of an accident; you can’t just walk away because you have other plans. There are lives at risk, maybe fifty of them.” He turns off the heat under the vegetables and sighs. “I should let you know, I considered asking you to come with me, but it looks like an absolutely miserable time if you do. Right back to hiding in the wilderness and scurrying around at night and scrounging for food, just when you’ve gotten a better situation here.”

“Isn’t the gate going to open soon? I thought the whole reason we came here was to help with that.”

“You’ll—oh. You’ll have help with the gate.”

“What help? I don’t understand. Can’t you fix it from here? You have that whole web of cause and effect going on, can’t you pull on a string and make it not happen? If it’s that far in the future?”

“You’ve read too many serials. It’s not a web, it’s like…” He sighs. “Get your food and let’s sit down.”

Barclay does, feeling more with every passing moment as if he’s losing hold of what was just starting to be a livable life. Indrid scoots his chair very close to the table, so that it’s practically squashing his body between table and chair, and he briefly puts a hand over his eyes as if to think.

“Okay,” he says. “Here is some information about how all this works. I see all the possibilities, and they’re effectively infinite.” He seems to be relaxing with the shift in topic, and he fiddles with his food a little. “I mean there are limitations, but the futures are uncountable and always multiplying, so experientially they might as well be infinite. It’s technically possible in some futures that you, for example, will do something wildly out of character, like climb up on a soapbox and tell the city who you are and where you came from. But it’s not at all likely, so I’d have to spend a long time looking through possible futures to see that happen.

“All of which is made more complicated by the fact that I’m a conscious actor looking at all these futures, and the fact of my seeing them and making decisions based on what I see is constantly altering the probabilities. I can do very improbable things if I can find the future that tells me how it happens. That power is half the reason this skill was developed in the first place, and why I was…”

He stops himself short and his eyes go out of focus, like he’s stopped paying attention to the present again and is watching the futures play out. Barclay watches him and thinks about how that sentence might have ended. He thinks about Indrid, about the patchy story of his past as he’s told it, about his possession of a highly rare and specialized skill that isn’t supposed to be taught to journalists or tinkerers or random consultants.

“How did you learn to do this, Indrid?”

Indrid sighs and his shoulders sag with something resembling relief. “I lied,” he says. “About my past.”

That statement, by itself, isn’t news. “How much of it?”

“Well.” Indrid pushes the bowl of food away from him and puts his hands to his temples, sighs, looks at Barclay from between his hands. “I did do those things I said. The newspaper, making and selling magic items, all that. For over forty years. Ever since I—” He drops his hands and looks away. “Ever since I returned from Earth the first time.”

Barclay keeps looking at Indrid, even though Indrid is avoiding his gaze. “How did you get back home?”

“The first time wasn’t an exile. It was a mission. For the court. Where I worked. Exactly as you assumed when we first met.” He folds his arms on the table and puts his head down on them like he’s exhausted. Nobody speaks for a while, until Indrid says, speaking into the table, “There are a lot of different conversations we can have right now, and if I start to trying to answer ‘why’ questions it’s going to be very difficult and I don’t think I’ll get around to answering the question you asked about time, so I’d like to go back to that first.” He looks up as if for permission. Barclay makes a “go on” gesture and discreetly takes a few deep breaths of his own, trying to suss out what kind of conversation this really is.

“So…time,” Indrid says. He drums the fingers of one hand against the table and sits up a little. “It doesn’t actually make sense to talk about time as an element in isolation. What I mean when I talk about time is that I can perceive the world going on, just more extensively than most people can. Most people who pay sufficient attention know some things that are going to happen, and can put forth a few possible alternatives where things are uncertain. I can just see those alternatives with specificity, for everyone and everything near me, and a lot of things farther away if I focus.”

“But not with your eyes.”

“Well, no, not with my literal, physical eyes, but I’m still seeing. It’s a primarily visual, secondarily aural experience. I can tune in other physical senses if I really pay attention to a particular future, but there’s seldom reason to do that. There’s plenty of information to process just from the visuals.” He flicks his eyes over at Barclay’s face as if to check that he’s paying attention. He is, although this no longer seems like the most important topic to discuss. “But all of it is in flux, constantly, and I can’t see every possibility. Like I said, they’re effectively infinite. So when I want to influence the future, I don’t just change one thing and eliminate one future—there are infinitely more of them, and anybody or anything might come in sideways and undo what I just did. To eventuate an outcome I have to apply concerted effort. Or, really, the way it was supposed to work is that I would tell the court about it, and the Interpreter would confer with Sylvain about it, and the Council would have legislative process about it, and the general apparatus of the state would put a plan in place. But since I’m now…freelance, as it were, those roles have been collapsed into my person.”

“Why?” Barclay asks, trying to say it gently, possibly not succeeding. “You work so hard just to keep us alive, why are you still acting like the world is your responsibility? This world, especially?”

“It’s…” Indrid closes his eyes for a moment; his brow is furrowed and he looks sad again. “I said…Okay. When I gained this ability, it was taught. Very painstakingly taught. There were a handful of us in my training cohort who attained some level of proficiency in that setting, and each of us ended up with a different level of responsibility. And I was selected for the Court.”

“Did you want that?” Barclay asks, worried, but Indrid waves him off.

“It was fine, that’s not what I’m trying to tell you. The selection was probably a better experience than that dissertation defense you went through. But to do that work you have to—I had to—make promises. The power comes from Sylvain, and she doesn’t hand it over lightly. She has to know that she can trust you with it. There are lines within which you have to stay. So there are vows about allegiance and the public good, but also quite specific rules about where you will and won’t look, and how you disclose what you see. And once you are absolutely clear in your mind, in your words, in your actions, that you will follow those rules forever— _forever_ —then, and only then, Sylvain grants the full measure of sight. Not just while you’re in the chamber with the Heart, or as part of a ritual, but permanently, everywhere you go. You have to know that you won’t abandon the code of ethics, because you can’t walk away after that. It’s an un-returnable gift.”

“So,” Barclay says slowly, “your thing about when you have to tell the truth.”

“Yes. That. If I lied about the future—even white lies, even inadvertent ones—the whole thing would be bullshit. Colleagues could take some steps to verify what I saw, but in large part they had to just believe me, or not. But there’s more than that.”

At this point Indrid stalls out again, looking into the middle distance, like he doesn’t know how to get from this abstract discussion to the story of what happened to land him here, on Earth, apparently for the second time. Barclay feels a little like he used to when students came to his office to ask for an extension, and then wound up crying about how their whole hometown had fallen to the Quell. Maybe it’s that thought that prompts him to say, “You don’t have to tell this story now. You can take more time if you need it.”

“No, that won’t help,” Indrid says, and Barclay supposes that he knows that for certain. “I’ve been putting this off for so long, and that’s such a stupid thing to do in my position. It’s all horribly immature and disappointing of me.”

“Okay,” Barclay says, softly. “That’s okay.” He’s a little lost. He would tell students not to insult themselves like that, but Indrid weirdly seems a little cheered up by it. This isn’t a student, this is his—well, it’s a terrible time to define the relationship, but this is Indrid, and so he asks, “Are you okay with being touched right now?”

Indrid blinks at him. “In a moment I’m going to get up and pace for a while, and you don’t want to follow me back and forth across the floor, but ask me again when I stop.”

Barclay smiles a little. Indrid, true to his word, gets to his feet and does a circuit of the room, and then another, and then, looking a little frustrated, goes to the window to undo the twist tie holding back the curtain. The curtain flops free, lightweight and letting the sun shine through it, but enough to block the view in or out. Indrid takes off his disguise bracelet and becomes himself, the delicate silver structures of his body coming into view as if a fog were clearing away, and he shakes his wings free and stands still for a moment, thinking.

“Okay,” he says. “This was a little over fifty years ago. Things were…do you remember?”

“That would have been around the time the old reservoir dried up?”

“Right. It was…” Indrid grimaces a little. He has one pair of hands on his hips and the other two arms wrapped around his chest, and after a moment he starts pacing again. “Chaotic. The Council had been in discussion about it all for a long time. One or the other of them decided that what they needed was more information, and I was—I honestly don’t remember if I volunteered for this job or if they just figured I was the most likely to survive it. One way or another I was sent through the gate, for reconnaissance.

“Crossing worlds was hard. To the best of my knowledge no other seers have done it, so I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of new information. And it wasn’t…a place like this. Or somewhere as quiet as Iceland, either. To the east of that, if I understand the geography right. On the next continent over. I suppose I could use a library or something to find out what was happening back then. I hope it’s easy to find out, because I hope it was a very major event. If that’s the kind of thing that’s just constantly going on over here then they’re hardly better off than we are.

“Anyway. It was a war, more or less. Well, not less. Bigger and uglier and worse than anything we ever had. I wasn’t even in it—I emerged from the gate in the middle of a field, but every time I looked ahead there was just—death. Death by stabbing and shooting and things falling out of the sky and, as near I could tell, poisoned air that rolled in as a cloud and destroyed the people within it.”

Indrid slows his pacing and stares at the window. It’s late enough in the evening that the sunlight is coming at them slantwise through the curtain, putting a bright stripe across the wall that dances a little as the curtain lifts in the wind. Indrid grasps with one hand at the pendant hanging from his neck. “I lasted about six weeks. I learned next to nothing. There had been some hope I would be able to find the lost piece of the Heart, but that was so utterly, laughably impossible. It was a long time gone, and I—I’m the worst person to solve an old mystery. Maybe the Council thought I had a connection to her, but there was nothing, no call, no trail, no signal. Just all that abominable suffering, and nothing I could do about any of it. At the very most I might have provided enough of a distraction to interfere with one of those attacks, and it might save some lives but only in the short term. Devastatingly short. Death and failure, period. I spent the whole time staying one step ahead of the violence and terrified it would damage the gate before I could go back through. Like I said, I made it six weeks.”

He’s stopped going back and forth. Barclay gets up to move closer, and before he can repeat the question about being touched, Indrid puts out a hand and takes one of Barclay’s, holding on without looking. He has delicate fingers but a firm grip.

“I spent the last three days there just waiting for the gate to open. It works by moonlight, over on this side, and the sky wouldn’t clear enough to let any light through, and the danger got closer to the gate every day. I was afraid that even if it did open, going through it would lead an army home after me. I squeaked through, in the end. The guards took me to the Minister of Preservation, and I couldn’t even make a report, not one that was worth anything. I’m afraid what I did say rather worsened his disgust with everybody and everything from Earth. And I talked to the Interpreter, but he…I suppose you don’t know him.”

“Not personally, no.”

“Well. It’s been hard on him, I’ll just say that. At least he didn’t call for an attack on Earth, which is worth something, since that possibility had been flickering in and out of my view for years. Presumably he thought the risk was too great, the reward too unlikely. I went back to my job. I tried to resume my work, but I kept overshooting the mark. It was just the end, everywhere I tried to look. The last of the Light winking out. All of us giving up at last.”

He stays quiet for a few moments. Barclay steps a little closer to remind Indrid that he’s here. He feels like his human form is unmatched to this conversation, like he’s inappropriately wearing a costume, but removing his bracelet would require taking his hand back.

Indrid shakes himself off a little and says flatly, “I stayed on the job for a while after my return. And I accomplished nothing, and after a year I gave up.”

“You resigned?”

“I abandoned my post.”

“So, what, you fled in the night?”

“Well, I told them I was leaving. I didn’t want anyone to waste time figuring out where I’d gone. But effectively, yes. I packed a bag and left on foot. I settled in a town close to the city. I picked up work. I was lucky; some people maybe knew there was such a person as the court seer, but I wasn’t really a public figure. There were people coming in from all over, and I was just another newcomer. I made magic items and I carved out a living and eventually I started the newspaper, for the sake of having some useful work to do. It wasn’t going to save the world, but it did cut down on the panic people felt about not knowing what was going on. So that’s not nothing. Inadequate recompense for being forsworn, but not nothing.”

Barclay squeezes his hand a little and asks, “Were you seriously not supposed to quit your job, ever? Wasn’t there a provision for that?”

Indrid looks at him a little imperiously; it’s easy to imagine that he’s thinking _I knew you were about to ask that, but it’s very strange of you to do so._ “Barclay, I was the _last one_. Originally I could have handed the job on to someone else, but then Sylvain left us and that was impossible.”

“I thought you trained with a cohort.”

“Yes, and they could give you a decent palm reading and tell you where to dig a well. No one else could do my job, because no one else was selected for it and given the appropriate measure of sight. I was supposed to keep it.”

“Until the end of the world?”

“Until some solution could be found! I was supposed to find a solution. I promised.”

Barclay thinks about that for a moment. “So,” he says slowly, “the promise means you said something about the future, and then you made it false?”

Indrid squeezes his hand a little tighter and doesn’t say anything for a moment.

“I have to think it counts for something,” Barclay says, “that you prevented an interplanetary war. I’m not sure you’re giving yourself enough credit there.”

Indrid sighs. “That probably wasn’t going to happen anyway. I just—I never made any claims to great virtue. I’m not even a nice person. I committed to a narrow set of principles, and they were supposed to be absolute, and then I broke them. Saw myself breaking them for ages before it happened, which only made it worse. And I know that my staring at the death of the planet every day did no good for anybody, but that’s what’s so disappointing about the whole thing. I was supposed to be talented enough it would be useful, and I couldn’t do it, so instead I made a liar out of myself and had to go away just to survive. And eventually I couldn’t even do that right, and I got kicked right off the planet.” He rubs at his forehead with one of his free hands. Barclay has seldom spent this much time this close to Indrid’s original body; he’d forgotten about the absorbing quality of his eyes, which take in the whole room without reflecting any light back, but also reveal less of his thoughts than his human face does.

“Can I say something selfish?” Barclay tries.

Indrid just looks at him.

“I’m really sorry about what happened to you, but I’m still glad it led you here.”

“You’re just saying that because I’m so devastatingly attractive.”

“Well, it doesn’t hurt.” That gets a laugh, just a tiny huff of breath. “But seriously, you saved my life. I thought I was bound to lie down on the ground and die within days of getting exiled, and look at us now. You did _everything_ for me. I don’t know what a good person is, but I’m so grateful for you. And, uh. I don’t really want you to leave.”

Indrid has a curiously hesitant reaction to that, like he doesn’t know how he feels about it. “Barclay,” he says. “This isn’t me leaving you. You understand that, right? That isn’t my intention.”

“I guess,” Barclay says, feeling exposed. He hadn’t intended to change the subject to his own feelings.

“There’s just a kind of amends I can make, a kind of help I can offer, that can’t come from anybody else in this whole world. I’m too vain to have lost my self respect or need to get it back, but it counts for a lot to matter in that way. I molded my whole self around a particular kind of work, and if there are people who need that, who need me, specifically…and anyway, doing everything for you, as you say—that way lies danger. I don’t want to be your boss, or your babysitter. Remember the last time I left? And you said you’d learned something from being here on your own?”

“I didn’t mean you should go away for longer—”

“No, of course not, but what I mean is you’re very, very likely to be okay. And I wouldn’t say that if it weren’t true. I might have broken my vows once, disastrously even, but I still keep that one the best I can. I…” He seems to gaze into the distance for a moment, and then he sets his shoulders and turns his whole body to take each of Barclay’s hands in two of his own, a curious criss-cross maneuver. His wings come forward to curve around them, shadowing Barclay’s eyes from the sunlight. “Listen. I have to go. I’ll come back. Later I’ll probably have to leave again, and I’ll come back then too. I’ll come back every time until I physically can’t or you tell me not to, and wherever I am, I’ll do whatever I can to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

Barclay’s mouth has gone dry. It feels like a hundred years have passed since he came through the door to the apartment. “I don’t know if I do understand,” he admits. “I wish you would stay. But I’m not going to claim my comfort is worth more than fifty lives.”

Indrid squeezes his hands. “You’re worth so much more than you know.”

  


* * *

  


He did that too fast. Indrid makes his way south with that one thought ringing in his head.

He knew that conversation, that set of promises, was coming. He’s been seeing it since Iceland, and lately it has been a shared feature of all his futures. After well over a year of him and Barclay keeping each other alive, it had felt like high time to lay his cards on the table. But maybe it wasn’t? Now that it’s in the past he can’t see it in the same way. Instead of a variety of possible futures populating his vision, sharpening or dimming as a course of action is taken, he can now only see that conversation as a memory, slippery and stained with feelings, changing with his mood rather than with the progress of time. He came on too strong; no, he was too withholding. He promised too much, too permanently; or else he neglected to say anything that mattered. He said he’d be around, but he never said he cared.

Has he _ever_ said that yet? He tries to remember, but all he can see is the future. There are some futures where he speaks, it appears, more warmly, expressing affection and not just a practical commitment; but he is pretty sure he hasn’t managed it so far. He remembers that at one crucial point he told Barclay he was happy. It’s useful to have said that aloud, because that makes it easier to remember that it was true. But as far as he can recall, it was the only time he’s said something of that kind since stumbling through the gate to Iceland.

The miserable thing about this whole train of thought, he realizes after far too much time has elapsed, is that it’s all about himself. Here he is, worried about what he’s done to Barclay, or to him-and-Barclay, to their little team; and he’s neglecting to consider fifty percent of its membership.

 _I wish you would stay,_ Barclay said. It would be a comforting thought, except that Indrid left anyway.

In a green and hilly city, Indrid slips off a train carrying one small bag and the conviction that if he’s ruined everything, he at least ought to make the trip worth it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Frank O’Hara’s poem [To the Harbormaster](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42661/to-the-harbormaster). The endearments Indrid keeps biting back, and my whole interest in this ship in the first place, are thanks to the series [grace coming out of the void](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1308866) by pocky_slash. I’ve written up a post about other stuff that is influencing the fic [over at Dreamwidth](https://eccentric-hat.dreamwidth.org/372375.html). 
> 
> I have work to do before I can post more chapters, and having this version of Indrid in my head has made me wary of promising things, but I'm still very much in process and hope to be back sooner rather than later.


	6. Interlude: teased with impertinent questions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a short bit of this story to tide us over while I'm Yuletiding. Chapter title is another one from Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases. Thanks again to plinytheyounger for the beta!

Indrid’s still hanging around the Lodge when Aubrey arranges a game night. She says it’s for Duck’s sake.

Barclay likes Duck, but he’s one of those small-town guys who mostly finished making friends when they graduated from high school. He does seem decently close with Ned and Leo—and Aubrey, of course, but Aubrey’s got a gift for that kind of thing. Anyway, Duck’s the kind of local who, when Amnesty started serving food, kept going up to the Wolf Ember instead of checking out the new hippie restaurant in the woods. On bad days, Barclay still resents him a little for having waited so long to get into the fight. Most days, though, he’s just grateful for Duck’s help. Barclay’s been able to take a backseat role in the last couple hunts, and he’s needed that kind of break for a long time. Duck seems committed to the work now, and he’s doing a good job—or he was until he abruptly lost his super strength. It’s really done a number on him; he keeps flinching at loud noises and yelling about how he’s just a normal human person. Aubrey thinks he needs company. Barclay isn’t sure that will help, but if Duck agrees to come it probably won’t hurt.

The game night gets canceled for a moment when it looks like Agent Stern will be there, then un-canceled when Stern decides to get out of the radio quiet zone for the weekend, presumably for secret government reasons. Barclay watches through the blinds of Indrid’s RV as Stern gets into his car and pulls out of the parking lot. He waits to feel less anxious, but instead he just starts to worry about what Stern will report to his colleagues.

“Relax,” Indrid tells him, as he adjusts the knot on Barclay’s bracelet. He hesitates and adds, “Remember that conversation about telling people things about yourself?”

“Yes?” Barclay says, wary.

“Well. I’ll be there if you need me.”

That’s not very reassuring, but Barclay doesn’t think he can beg off of game night by saying he got too nervous, so they decamp to the hotel lobby. Aubrey and Dani are there, arranging a bunch of brightly colored cardboard hexagons into a game board while Duck stands by with his hands in his pockets.

“Hi Indrid!” Aubrey says. “Are you going to play?”

“Probably not,” Indrid says, plucking an afghan off a couch and heading for a seat by the fire. “I usually don’t; it’s not terribly sporting.”

“What if we’re playing a game with dice?” Aubrey says. “That’s pretty random, right? So you wouldn’t know what’s going to happen?”

Indrid says, “Mm,” which doesn’t mean anything, and Barclay rolls his eyes and says, “You don’t want him to play, he’s a sore loser.”

“Lies and slander,” Indrid says lightly, swaddling himself in the blanket and snuggling into his chair. “Ned might come over when his TV show is done, just so you know.”

“Oh, great! Is Mama coming?”

Barclay says, “I think she’s in her studio.” Mama claims she doesn’t care for board games. The truth is that she’s intensely competitive and an even worse loser than Indrid. Barclay plays gin rummy with her sometimes, mostly to let off steam when the tension of a hunt gets high, but they can’t play in the lobby or the residents get alarmed by Mama’s vituperative swearing and threats to evict Barclay from the lodge.

“That’s okay. If we’ve got four people, we don’t need the extension. So the first thing is—”

Aubrey is very careful about explaining how to play Settlers of Catan, but Barclay doesn’t entirely understand. He proceeds to lose the first game and immediately fall behind on the second. He keeps an eye on Duck, who does a better job at the game but doesn’t keep up his end of the conversation. “ _Duck_ ,” Aubrey says at one point, with exaggerated emphasis, “I _said_ , I’ve got wood for sheep, whaddaya say?”

She’s offering him an easy opening for a dumb joke, but instead of taking it, Duck looks thoughtfully toward Barclay and says, “Hey, you know that film?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Barclay can see Indrid turning away from the fire to watch them.

Barclay smiles, though it’s a little forced. “I know a lot of movies, Duck.”

“Nah, not a movie, I mean—the film, the famous Bigfoot film from the sixties.”

Barclay counts to five in his head, and when no intervention appears he says,“Patterson and Gimlin? Yeah, I’m pretty familiar with it.”

“So—” Duck’s brow is furrowed. “I mean, this might be a rude question, but I was looking into that stuff after—well, after y’all turned out to be living more or less in my backyard. And the thing I kept wondering was—did they ever catch you? Or come close? Like were you ever really in danger of that? It seems like I would have heard about it, but I—ugh.”

Barclay watches, concerned, as Duck puts down his cards and rubs his hands over his face, like he doesn’t want to look at anybody. “I’ve been...” he says. And Barclay knows that Duck’s been scared, and Aubrey and Dani know it, and Indrid has figured it out if he’s paying any attention at all, and so have most of the folks in Kepler and a number of people in Sylvain—but despite all that, Duck can’t manage to finish his sentence. “Fuck. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be asking you this. I mean, is that even you in that video?”

Barclay is too taken aback to answer right away.

“It’s just,” Duck says, digging this pointless hole deeper, “the Bigfoot in that video is—isn’t it a female?”

Both Aubrey and Dani look shocked. “Duck!” Aubrey cries. “You can’t just ask people about—”

“—About their _videos_ ,” Dani finishes.

“Yeah!” Aubrey says, and then she looks confused. “Wait, what?”

Barclay closes his eyes for a moment and then opens them to see what Indrid is doing. He’s watching the conversation but not making a move to intervene. When he sees Barclay looking, he shrugs a little apologetically and mouths the words _your move_.

“No. That’s not me,” Barclay says, not looking back at Duck. “In the film.”

Aubrey says, “Ohhhh.”

Dani looks incredulously at him: “Barclay, what? How—it’s—you’ve just been letting us all think—how many times have you warned us about cameras? What was that all about, if you weren’t—”

Duck asks, “So do you have a sister or something?”

Barclay picks up his cards and studies them instead of facing anybody else. “I do, actually.”

Dani makes a soft, shocked sound in the back of her throat. “What! You never—”

Simultaneously, Duck says, “So is she—”

“No,” Barclay says, “it’s not her either. She’s never been to Earth. And at that point I had never been to California.” He starts rearranging his cards by what he could do with them, if they ever resume the game. A sheep card plus a brick card plus a wood card plus a grain card equals a settlement.

Dani seems hurt, and Barclay feels a lump of guilt forming in his chest; he’s going to owe her a one-on-one talk later. “But you were on Earth then, right?” she asks. “You said you came over in ’65.”

“Yeah,” Barclay says, “I was. That’s true.” He looks at Indrid again, this time a little pointedly, not so much to get his attention as to remind the rest of the room that he’s there. Indrid looks back, patient, with a sad twist to his mouth.

“1967,” Barclay says, “was kind of a complicated year.”


End file.
